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!
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.
I'll let the market sort out corporate efficiency
I'm more interested in fair, progressive taxation for all
@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.
@alanrycroft @volkris @skykiss progressive taxation is incredibly irrational.
Such a statement is like talking about cancer treatment, but extended to people without cancer: it's no minor thing to extend the concept from the one situation to the other.
@volkris @alanrycroft @skykiss Unfortunately most regular citizens are not subsidized like the gas and oil industry. And, when you take into consideration the related climate damage (that the oil companies knew about in the ‘70’s but hid the data) the costs of us letting them garner profits while being subsidized and paying less taxes than an average citizen…. 1/2
Oh you're going into that whole thing about the gas and oil industry being subsidized. So much of that is easily debunked, based on these sensationalized claims that just don't really match how the federal government functions.
Those claims make for a good story, they get a lot of clicks, but they're just not reality.
But regardless of that, it still doesn't excuse what we're talking about here. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Let's get out of messing with the corporate balance sheets. Whether that's oil industry or any other. Let's just avoid that complication altogether.
You're talking about the average person versus corporations, but let's just talk about people paying their fair share, and corporations are not people.
Every bit that you tax from a corporation eventually comes from a person, so let's not go through that taxation through other steps where we cannot make it progressive because we can't control who is buying from the corporation.
@volkris @alanrycroft @skykiss Well, we clearly need to claw back profits that are creating costs and are built on subsidies.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/011216/understanding-how-oil-companies-pay-taxes.asp
Exxon Mobil only paid about 3% tax
2/2
Profits do not create costs. That's just not how legitimate accounting works.
Profits are income minus costs, profits are the situation after costs are already deducted, so it just doesn't make mathematical sense to talk about profits creating costs.
Exxon Mobil may have submitted money to the US Treasury but you know where that money came from? Customers.
Every person who went to an Exxon gas station was charged to pay that tax bill. No matter how poor you were, no matter how much you were struggling to balance your checking account at the end of the month, you ended up paying that taxation which is a huge problem.
Corporations aren't people. We should not talk as if they are for the sake of taxation.
Thank goodness Exxon was able to minimize its taxation as much as it did or else it would have had to take even more from a whole lot of people who couldn't afford it.
@volkris @alanrycroft @skykiss Yes it's incredibly stupid. they should just tax negative externalities.
@volkris @skykiss
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
#FairTaxation #taxes