Saturday, October 20, 2012

Let's Just All Get Incorporated, Then!


The reason?  Watch this, from Fox News:




How oddly things intertwine and knot.  One reason for the 37% figure of federal income taxes paid by the richest one percent of taxpayers is that the calculations attribute the income tax firms pay to their owners, and most of the owners belong to that top one percent.  Here the suggestion is that ALL of the incidence of the taxes falls ultimately on the consumers!  You can't have it both ways, conservatives.

How the incidence of any tax goes is an empirical question, by the way, and depends on the characteristics of a particular marketplace.  But it's extremely unlikely that corporations can just raise their prices whenever corporate taxes rise.

And on those high US corporate income taxes:  That's the rate.  The actual taxes paid by US firms are much lower than the initial rate because of all the deductions and tax loopholes.  Indeed, the US ranks pretty low in corporate taxes paid among the OECD countries.