While you were robbed blind at the pump this year (and GOP blamed Biden), Exxon made $55,700,000,000 in profits.
Over $1 billion per week.
$152,600,000 per day.
$1,766.24 per *second.*
"Congress should heed #POTUS’s call and pass my bill to claw back Big Oil’s excess profits."
- Sheldon Whitehouse, Senator
@skykiss ☝🏻
Claw back all excess profits in all sectors, and of course oil and gas 🔥
Here in Canada too
Excess profits is a funny term.
It's one person deciding how much someone else should make, beyond their costs.
So like, I think you made too much last year. I'm going to call back some of your income because it was too much that you made.
Guess you should have spent more on groceries!
It's more like progressive income tax that we already have for individuals
But extended to corporations
As profit levels rise, so should corporate taxes
The main reason I disagree is that since corporations aren't people, it skews the costs to actual people as corporations are taxed.
The corporation is just going to pass the cost of taxes along to customers, often harming the ones that can least afford to pay increased prices.
So that kind of taxation strikes me as particularly unfair.
But the other reason I disagree is that it digs into the incentive corporations have to be efficient, including things like energy efficiency.
I WANT the corporation to experience a benefit from things like investing in less polluting equipment.
Tax away the incentive to be more efficient and you get less efficiency.
@alanrycroft keep in mind that the market considers taxation when it sorts things out.
So again, if you put taxes on corporate profits, that means the market has less incentive to pursue efficiency.
If the company is going to lose money through either buying more efficient vehicles or taxation then there's a lot less reason to do the first than the second. It's going to lose the money either way. So the market won't worry so much about efficiency.
That's the problem.
@volkris @alanrycroft @skykiss
Investing in your company lowers your net income and lowers your taxes. That's why companies invested more into their companies when marginal tax rates were high.
And if we don't want that to be the case, we can change it.
There is some social benefit to investing in companies, but if we don't think that benefit is worthy of the tax policy, okay, we can stop allowing people to deduct investment activities from their income.
@volkris @alanrycroft @skykiss Yes we want taxes on negative externalities, so a carbon tax would be great. Land value taxes are great because they have neutral dead weight loss. taxing "excess profit" is just brain dead stupid economically illiterate nonsense.
@volkris @skykiss
I'll let the market sort out corporate efficiency
I'm more interested in fair, progressive taxation for all
#taxes #FairTaxation