this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
153 points (95.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35818 readers
883 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

And what would happen if we did?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yes that's true, I was trying to make the point that the ownership of the company is usually directly responsible for its success, whatever form that takes. And forcing the dilution of ownership (by taxing a company on its overall market cap rather than its profits) is only going to be disruptive to whatever arrangement made it successful in the first place (be that forcing control out of the hands of a good founder or diluting the control of a group of investors that approved a good board). Don't get me wrong, that might sometimes be a good thing. It's just that the logic "you've made this company is so successful you're going to have less control over it" is unlikely to work out well in the long run. Better to take more taxes from profits if anything (as long as that's internationally competitive) or have stronger laws preventing companies with huge value from muscling in and taking over competitors or whole industries (eg Musk etc)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That would be true if companies did not create elaborate constructions and park money in tax havens.

I'd almost say that companies should be taxed (a different rate) not on profits but on revenue. If they make the revenue in your country, it should be taxed in your country.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yes, tax havens are a problem

I'd almost say that companies should be taxed not on profits but on revenue

This is what sales tax is though. Tax collected at the point of sale (ie revenue). You can collect it direct from companies instead but all you'd see is the 'sales tax' line of your shopping cart go higher.

Profit is taxed instead of revenue (in general) because companies operate on wildly different margins (the difference between revenue and profit). So let's ignore the fact it would get passed directly onto consumers and assume a revenue tax is borne by the companies... Say your revenue tax was 2% you might have a negligible effect on Apple, they have a large gap between their revenue and costs so they just absorb this as a tiny dent on profits, Tesla might be hit moderately hard (the amount of profit they turn compared to revenue is smaller so a revenue tax makes a much larger impact on profit), and it may have a catastrophic impact on Starbucks (very small gap between revenue and expenses so decreasing revenue via a 2% tax almost completely eradicates profits).

I'm making up which company's which just to illustrate that a revenue tax doesn't land equally across companies. Some industries are low margin some are high margin and a revenue tax disproportionally clobbers low margin industries. Which might not be the effect we wanted. So it's better to tax profit.

This does create issues where companies deliberately don't turn a profit because they aggressively reinvest in expansion and acquisition.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Except in this case the tax is levied across the entire value chain. But yes, this would favor high margin business over low margin ones. But isn't the current system doing that too? Investors throw money at high margin companies while not so much at low margin ones.