> On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Max Sawicky wrote:
> > Offense at the idea of corporations
> > as persons, with reference to freedom
> > of speech or due process is puzzling.
>
> Why is it puzzling? The complaint I have is that *human* rights are
> accorded to an artificial legal entity, not the people in it. The
Because 'rights' for corporations are no different than recognizing that the rights of individual owners of the corps as individuals carry over to their roles as owners.
This molehill of an issue seems to be a way some people think they can use to attack the legal legitimacy of capital. Rather a circuitous route. If there were no corps, capital would still be owned by persons who would have rights.
> . . .
> sickening form of reification. What other inanimate objects would you
> extent human rights too? A car? A sofa?
Take some Maalox. Clearly it is owners or persons acting on behalf of a corp who exercise any rights, not "inanimate objects."
> . . .
> Now I know you've gone to one too many Cato lunches. Just watch them
Only one that I can remember. The food was awful. Vegetarian crap.
> on C-SPAN, like I do, I don't think you can catch the disease through
> the TV. The double taxation canard is a favorite of the right. But
No, it also extends to anyone with an elementary knowledge of taxation. Now whether d-t is a problem or deserves special priority are different matters entirely, ones which nobody seems to have noticed that I did not address. All I said that other things equal, corporate capital's special legal status was matched by a differential tax burden. I didn't say this was a terrible thing, but it was like throwing a bunch of bananas into a cage of fifty famished baboons.
> if this phrase "double taxation" is to mean anything, why isn't it
> true of my income as a wage slave.
It is true, but a better analogy than a sales tax is income and payroll taxation, which double-tax wages. The sales tax is a tax on consumption, not wages (keeping things simple), and is paid regardless of whether the consumption is financed by wages, interest, or transfer payments.
> I pay income taxes and then I turn
> around and pay sales tax on the money I have left after the nasty
> confiscatory Federal Gov't has stolen from me. How is that any
> less "double taxation"? If you want to keep the fiction of the corp
> as a person in place, isn't it just two different "people" being
> taxed?
If I'm analyzing tax incidence I'm interested when the same person is taxed in two different places (e.g., once as the individual recipient of dividends, and second as one of many owners of a business firm).
> $100 billion is what % of the 1997 budget? Yeah, that's about what I
> thought.
I did say "over $100" because I did not feel like looking up the number. Yes it's low, but so what? Who said it wasn't? Really!
JH offers:
<<Consider: the corporate sector controls more capital than the private sector, right? But the private sector pays far more total taxes in the US than the corporate sector does. So while marginal rates can be higher, the overall rate of taxation is lower (and dropping, if you can believe that!).>>
More tax is collected from the non-corporate sector because it applies to all income,not just to income from capital. Determining the extent of taxation of capital outside the corporate sector requires an analysis. It is not a matter of statistical reporting that one can just pluck out of a book. In that vein, there is some evidence that (all) capital is lightly taxed under the personal income tax, relative to the corporate, because there are more opportunities to offset tax liability for persons than for corporations.
Double-taxation of corporations as political cause was a right-wing fetish in the 1970's. Today they are after bigger game: what is called double-taxation of savings (which subsumes the corporate angle, for all practical purposes). I'm going to leave that fish to fry for another day.
MBS