Corporations pass the tax expenses on to consumers as higher prices of produced goods, lower wages to employees, and lower returns to owners that supply capital. These taxes are all paid by us but they are largely invisible and justified to the voters as making corporations “pay their fair share”.
These taxes are paid by various stakeholders and entities around the business. The public gets the tax income and uses it for services to allow the business to operate.
Do you feel the cost/value of having the ability to a call a number and have a well trained team put out a fire in minutes that could ruin your business is 0 or free? What about rules/services that allows your business to have an advantage over another in a different region?
Taxes need to be paided by everyone. Corporations use more services than you would think and rely on a stable government that they need to contribute to.
Getting more money in the hands of governments is not going to do to us any good, they will just increase spending.
It will end up being: increase in price -> increase in government spending.
Everyone will pay the increased prices, governments will pocket a % to keep their employees busy or employ their friends for public work, some of it will be redistributed to a portion of the population.
I believe taxes shouldn't be paid by anyone and governments should disappear.
Corporate tax, as a share of total taxation in the US, has dropped from 30% to 10% since the 50's ... yet wages have been pretty stagnant since the 80's (in real terms).
The top corporate tax rate had been ~35% for roughly 25 years ; in 2018 it dropped to 21% and wage growth has indeed increased since 2018. Were wages positively affected by the lower corporate tax rate? I don’t know, so many factors affect the economy; corporations might choose to lower prices or do more research on better products or issue greater dividends to attract capital for expansion. I was just making the point that we humans end up paying somehow for the spending that the government chooses for us and that I would rather make these tax costs more visible to the people actually paying the taxes.
Average effective tax rate for corporations is considerably less than the top rate, so much so for companies like the FAANGs as to make a mockery of corporate tax as being anything more than a guarantee of full employment for tax attorneys. OTOH, brick and mortar which has to compete against Amazon has the privilege of paying for Amazon.
Corporate taxes are not expenses. An expense is the cost of operations that a company incurs to generate revenue, either on cost or accrual basis. Corporate taxes are based on declared profits, gross revenue net of these expenses.
Furthermore, these taxes are not paid by all of us. They are paid by the owners of the corporation who and which receive considerable benefit from the government services they are paying for.
Consider corporate taxes, if you will, as use taxes for using the economy.
Effectively they're paid by the customers though. Investors will want to get their return on the money they invested regardless what happens. If they can't get their return they will simply invest in something else and the business never gets off the ground.
For example, if a corporation has no profit, common for startups trying to get off the ground, they pay no corporate income tax. This is the case because corporations pay income tax on profit not revenue. Having no corporate income tax would only shift that burden from the economic use case to elsewhere which is what happens with the FAANGs and multinationals. That elsewhere ends up as brick and mortar and individuals. BTW, tax fairness means lower as well. Brick and mortar and individuals would pay less if the FAANGs and multinationals paid fairly.
