Corporate Taxation (Was:How Feds Spend More on Suburban Educ. than in Poor Schools)

[Jim Westrich]

This implies that lobbying for tax breaks is only about money.  While this 
takes me a bit afield of the point about tax incidence (taxes, like water 
flowing downhill, end up on the people least able to avoid them, i. e. 
people acting as individuals without power and without means), I do have 
some observations about this political process.

Corporations avoid taxes as an exercise of power.  Power in two 
senses.  First, directly and obviously as in "We won't pay and you will, 
bend before our might peon!".  It is about winning and losing.  It is 
important to maintain political deterrents in nominal democracy.  Also, 
most political fights split "corporate interests" while corporate tax 
issues unite them  (so they may choose to work in a "non-corporate tax 
world" as a common bond).

A less obvious power move as I see it is while corporations CAN avoid taxes 
and pass them on to workers and consumers they do not have to or want 
to.  Holding this ability in reserve is also power. It is true that in more 
competitive markets corporations have less of this type of power, but I 
don't see many competitive markets.

Peace,

Jim

Doug said:
>I'm guessing that corps wouldn't spend all that money on lobbying for
>tax breaks if they thought they were passing along the costs to
>workers and customers.