[gottorf]

> Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%!

The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care; the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway.

> The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level.

You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?

[myvoiceismypass]

So for social security - Actually it’s not “the 1% are capped at 1% of their income” but rather capped at the same number, not percentage, as everyone else - which is around 180k per year. That was the argument being made.

[piva00]

> The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care; the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway.

As far as I know there are quite a few loopholes to be exploited which don't trigger a taxable event, loans using assets as collateral is one of them but there are a bunch of other nice holes that creative and well paid accountants/lawyers find if you have enough money for their services.

[bigbadfeline]

> The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care

It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs - this is a consequence of the regulatory fundamentals that have been in place for quite some time.

You'd be amazed how much fiscal policy can fix, even in the current messy state of other regulations.

> You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?

Not always and not at any level, it depends, the devil is in the details as usual.

[gottorf]

> It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs

I'm seeing no evidence that how much a nation taxes corporations affects its standard of living or political systems one way or another[0]. Norway and Cuba collect similarly high amounts (as a percentage of total tax receipts); the US rubs shoulders the likes of Spain, France, and Finland, as well as Cabo Verde and Tunisia in its relatively low collections.

[0]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/corporate-tax-statistic...

[dh2022]

re: " the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway" - not as much as you make it out to be. Large US corporations keep a pile of their profits outside the US. In theory this money would be taxed when it would be re-patriated to their US-based investors. In practice the corporations wait for the next Republican president to pass a tax holiday during which money transferred from outside the US to the US-investors is not taxed. GWB did that, Trump did that in his first term too.