Monday, September 19, 2011

Beep, wrong answer.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/19/news/economy/obama_debt_plan/index.htm?hpt=hp_t1

“A driving principle behind the proposal is that high-income individuals and corporations should pay more in taxes than they do currently so that they will bear some of the burden of debt reduction going forward. “

I have a serious problem with part of that statement and that is that “corporations” should pay more in taxes. Corporations don’t pay taxes because it is the people who purchase the goods or services from the corporation who pay the tax. That is right, the consumer (meaning us ordinary smucks).

Somebody needs to send somebody back to ECON 101. Corporations may appear to “pay” taxes, but any corporate manager/business owner worth his or her salt has calculated the cost of those taxes and included in the price of whatever good or service they provide. If they don’t, then they are incredibly stupid and need to take a course in business planning.

In other words, taxes on corporations really are just hidden taxes paid by us ordinary folks.

I am increasingly disappointed with the current administration’s seeming attacks on business and the wealthy. This is not a “from each according to their ability and to each according to their need” society, but it seems that the current administration is playing like it is.

2 comments:

Michael Raymond said...

ECON 101 might be a good refresher course for most of the voting public in addition to those seeking or holding public office. Liable to make for some rather large class sizes, though.

Maybe a remedial math course for some. First, we need to get away from the story problems: "If I have one apple, and you have one apple, we can feed the whole country by pretending that we have more."

Then we need to return to the discussion about negative numbers. 400 - 15,000,000,000,000 = 14.9T. Let's see, that's only about 47,000 apples each that we need to come up with.

We probably also need a science refresher class on holes, specifically on the first law of holes: if you're in one, stop digging (Will Rogers).

And, speaking of Will Rogers, maybe we need an elective on prescience and foreknowledge. Otherwise, from so long ago, how in the heck could he have known this: "So that leaves us without any economic problems whatsoever, except perhaps some day to have to pay for them." -- http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=23998

The higher classes such as GOV101, ETHICS, and Constitutional Law may have to wait a year or so to be incorporated.

Unknown said...

Point well taken, Mister Michael