My Photo

Categories

Feeds and more

  • [ BadgerLink logo ]
Blog powered by Typepad

Stats

Uppity Wisconsin - Progressive Webmasters

« Major Schism At Waxing America: Soglin-Orton Collide | Main | Another Bush Lie. So Simple, So Straightforward. »

October 22, 2007

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Chris

Interesting analysis, however your closing statement, "so taxing corporations is the only way to equitably gain needed revenue to educate our children, plow our streets, and combat public health menaces.", leaves much to be desired. Throwing education in with snow plowing is the biggest stretch of the imagination I can even conjure. Education is a 6 billion dollar gorilla hanging around our necks here in Wisconsin. We could freeze spending for 10 years and that still would be too much. The confiscation of our tax money purportedly for "the kids" is just a guise. No sir, education only needs to gain free market competition without taxpayers being penalized.

Paul

Chris: I admire your candor. It is nice for a change, to see someone acknowledge that a part of the 'anti-tax' agenda is to end public education.

Thomas J. Mertz

Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia all exempt textbooks from sales taxes. If increased sales taxes are being considered I think this would be a much better exemption than many already in place. I'd even extend it to all books.

Dan Sebald

I'll take the education gorilla instead of the war gorilla any day.

Peter Gruett

This double-taxation garbage is the same load of b.s. the conservatives trotted out during the estate tax debate and it really needs to be stood up to.

Yes, the corporation pays income taxes, they then give some of the money they payed taxes on to their workers, who pay individual income tax on it then spend some of it at a corporation-owned store where sales tax is assessed on it before the corporation pays income tax on it. This happens in dozens of different ways and you could probably trace money through dozens of points of "taxation". The point is, except for asset-based taxes like the property tax, *WE DON'T TAX MONEY* we tax transactions, usually only once.

This works because, contrary to the Esenberg model which imagines a corporation as the wellspring of wealth, gracefully allowing that wealth to trickle down to the stagnant, festering pools of the working poor where it (apparently) dies, the economy is actually cyclical.

Wealth is created when someone actually produces something, be it a product or idea, and is then pushed around from entity to entity within the economy until it ends up landfilled or something of the sort until someone finds a way to use the landfill. Corporations and other companies are vital drivers in this system but they're no more fundamental than any other part. Even the government isn't a black hole of tax dollars but takes a portion of economic activity for use in maintaining the infrastructure (roads, schools, utilities) that make commerce and civilized life possible in the first place.

I could write a book on the incredible sense of entitlement current held by our nation's wealthy elite but I'll simply say that we really do need our infrastructure (all of us) and it doesn't make any sense to place the entire burden of paying for it on people who can't afford to.

kr

Being no economics expert myself, I would think elasticity of prices comes into play. There are some goods and services for which businesses can only pass so much of the increased cost of taxes onto the consumer. Also there is the consideration how much a group of companies within a market control that market.

Maybe the best approach is to eliminate all corporate taxes and make it up in a much more progressive system of taxation. In there would be increased taxes for dividend interest which represents income for the shareholder.

As for the so-called death tax there is a bit of built-in nonsense to the argument that you are taxing the dead.

In short, no. The dead are dead. Like all taxes that work the way they should, the levy should be laid on those who benefit from the money -- the heirs.

Dean Weichmann

Paul, I urge you to take a look at revenue neutral carbon tax. Use it as a substitute for the sales tax in Wisconsin. It make sense if you are concerned with gobal warming yet would not be detrimental to the state economy. Please go to the carbon tax center, http://www.carbontax.org

The comments to this entry are closed.