this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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If a company makes a profit and they don't spend it, they're liable for corporation tax on it. It's in their best interest to spend it on growing.
It's just the more you spend, the more likely you are to hit diminishing returns. If you have shops in two towns, you can build another in a third town and make more money. Easy. If you already have enough shops to serve all the towns, building another might just take sales from your existing shops.
The corporations don't like this so now it's time to fire everybody and run a shit service with a skeleton crew instead, while jacking up the prices and hope your customers don't notice they're paying more for less.
That only became a thing recently with the ability to buyback stock preventing stock dilution, the low cost of buying and selling stock, and a shit bond market.
And if there isn't a competitor on the horizon, why invest in R&D?
I understand the sentiment but there should be limits to how much you can spend befor having to pay taxes. As an individual I pay taxes on 100% of my income, regardless of what i spend. wft!
It's an interesting idea and I agree, but at the same time how would you oversee it?
The only way I could come up with was to have all your earnings going into a government held account, and they tax you as you withdraw from that. Maybe even let you invest money into stocks and shares and so on, with no tax owed until you actually withdraw it.
You could pay in $100k a year for a bit, live a frugal lifestyle, then retire early and live on the account, paying barely any tax.
Similar to a pension, I guess, only you'd be able to take money out at any time.
Yeah I'm sure there could be a bunch of possible viable ways to implement this. It's already implemented for the common man, I don't see why it couldn't be done for companies. Using companies and boards of directors as a shield from taxes and responsibilities must end.