top | item 41849918

(no title)

userabchn | 1 year ago

> what if corporate income tax were tied to the logarithm of the number of employees+contractors? What if the corporate income tax increased with the market share in markets served?

Is there a reason for choosing those rather than the simpler alternative of the corporate income tax rate increasing progressively with revenue (as it does for individuals)?

discuss

order

efitz|1 year ago

I dunno. I have a natural affinity for continuous vs discrete functions. But I also think thresholds cause bad behavior when you are near a threshold; you try to game the system by exceeding the threshold while trying to appear to be below it.

Corporate accountants are sophisticated enough to deal with formulae, and small businesses would be unaffected as the function changes very slowly at small numbers so even an error would likely not materially affect your return.

Calculation of market share would be more problematic.

And of course if you don’t like logarithms then choose your favorite exponential function.

skybrian|1 year ago

Do you have revenue confused with income? VC-funded startups don’t pay income tax when they don’t have income (expenses exceed revenue).

Though, that’s less often true recently, now that they can’t expense software engineering salaries the same year.

efitz|1 year ago

Yes, you are right.