The Tea Party - how frightening is this movement?

[HappySqurriel]

ManusJustus said:

HappySqurriel said:

In what world do you live in? Is the sky purple where you are?

Taxes are a cost on businesses, and like all costs companies will do everything in their power to pass on the increased cost of taxes; or to recover the loss by cutting costs elsewhere. Corporations are never run as lean as they can be, and often they have staff on hand which represent a net-cost currently under the assumption that they will bring in increased profit down the road (new grads); at the same time corporations have an obligation to do everything in their power to meet their short term forecasts, and if they have to cut new grad and intern hires (for example) because taxes were increased to meet their profit forecasts they will.

On top of that, speaking from someone who has survived several rounds of layoffs in a company, you would be surprised by how much work really doesn't need to be done; and how much additional work (often free overtime) when people are afraid that they will be in the next round of layoffs.

More jabber?

Businesses always run to maximize profit.  Taxing individuals at that business, be it the wealthy at the top or the poor janitor at the bottom, has absolutely no effect on the amount of labor needed to maximize profit.  All that matters in maximizing profit is benefit verse cost, its that simple.  More taxes on the income of the wealthy is not considered in such a cost because it has no bearing on market demand for the good or service the company produces. 

Lets say we don't tax the wealthy and there is a demand for 100,000 Kia Rio cars.  You could tax the wealthy 90% of their income, but there will still be a demand for 100,000 KIA Rios so the company that makes them will still have to employ the same amount of workers to meet demand. 

You don't seem to be very smart, so I'm suprised you made it through several rounds of layoffs. That being said, companies are laying workers off simply because it is in their best financial intrests to do so.  If you gave the wealthy a tax cut, heck if you gave them a ton of money on top of that, businesses with unnecessary workers will still lay people off.  This should have become painfully obvious as businesses continue to let go of unnecessary workers even during Bush and Obama tax cuts.

While you're wrong, and companies can and will readily cut employees in the face of higher costs and use "productivity gains" to get a very similar quantity of work done by fewer people. In fact, one of the arguments used to push forward healthcare reform was that companies were cutting jobs due to the increased cost of health insurance; and I don't think companies would be willing to cut individuals for health insurance increases and not for tax increases. Anyways, I'll assume that you're strictly talking about increasing income taxes and we will ignore corporate taxes for a moment.

There are two distinct groups that this will target, high income earners in large corporations and small business owners. High income earners in large corporations will have the composition of their income change in ways that lowers their taxable income while maintaining their quality of life; quite often this will be increased stock options or discounted stock prices which change income to capital gains. Small business owners will (most likely) just switch the income they pay themself to dividends the company pays and (once again) pay capital gains rather than income tax.