1. US GDP estimated GDP in 2024 is $29 trillion. According to your first source, U.S. Federal Spending was 23% of GDP. If that were reduced to the 2014-2019 average of 20%, that would trim $870 billion from federal spending. That seems like good progress toward avoiding a potential debt crisis.
2. Reduce defense overall and make the process of getting money to the needy more efficient.
3. No comment. Healthcare is mess.
4. Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers. I'm in favor of tax reform, but thinking that taxing corporations is a way to stick it to rich people is shortsighted, IMO.
1. I actually mostly agree with you (and the other reply that said something along the same lines). IMO, the debt situation isn't great, and it's getting worse. Bringing down spending as a percentage of GDP doesn't necessarily require trimming the budget, though - it could also be done by keeping the budget flat and letting GDP growth catch up.
2. Personally, I'm not opposed to trimming defense spending. However, how do we square that with the current security environment (an increasingly antagonistic Russia, China, etc.) and the fact that defense spending is also essentially a domestic jobs program?
4. The share that corporations have been paying has been falling over time. I'm not saying we should stick it to rich people - but what about making corporate taxes more in line with what they've paid in the past, instead of having employees (those same consumers you're talking about) pick up the slack?
Don't worry about #2, Canada is taking care of this for you, to prevent fentanyl and illegals from pouring in over the top border (assume because of gravity...)
>Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers
The manner by which tariffs and taxes effect the price consumers pay are not at all the same. Tariffs have a far more direct (and immediate) impact.
And, in the case of taxes, these are not "just passed onto consumers" in healthy markets with good competition. But, I agree that this does not describe our current market, which I'm all in favor of fixing.
As it is these oligopolies and monopolies are double dipping. They get us on price and selection to their own gain, then threaten to get us even more if we ask them to pay more taxes on those gains.
Are you sure about point four? Taxes on corporate profits might be indirectly passed on to consumers (e.g. corporations take advantage of the knowledge of the taxes to justify raising prices), but since goods and services are presumably already optimally priced, and taxes on profits aren't an increase to costs, they shouldn't be directly passed on.
It would be an extraordinary claim to say that corporations are not pricing as high as they can without decreasing profits. If you believe that there is some other mechanism by which taxes on corporate profits could increase prices, please explain it.
Thank you for actually providing a source. I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but their methodology seems reasonable, although it's not certain that corporations would behave the same in response to a federal tax. As is, that paper supports the assertion that some percentage of taxes is passed on to consumers, though not a total pass through, which is very different from a blanket "taxes get passed on to consumers".
"A one percentage point increase in a state-level corporate tax rate leads to an increase in affected retail prices of approximately 0.24 percent." is much less strong of an affect than, say, tariffs.
They also say "Pass-through is larger for products purchased by high-income households, higher priced goods, and in less competitive markets.", which makes it seem like corporate taxes might still be highly progressive even with pass-through.
> Prices are set by supply and demand. Taxing corporate profits offsets the supply curve, resulting in higher prices. The data supports this.
Reducing corporate taxes also appears to reduce what is paid to labour:
> From 2010 to 2013, the Chinese central government cut the corporate income tax rate in 21 cities for service firms whose revenue from outsourcing services offshore surpassed half of their total revenue. Leveraging a regression discontinuity design with proprietary administrative data, we find that a one percentage point decrease in the statutory corporate income tax rate induces a one percentage point decrease in the firm-level labor share. Firms respond to the tax cut by increasing their physical capital and bank borrowing while keeping their employment unchanged, consistent with a capital deepening process documented in recent theoretical models. Our results suggest that falling corporate income taxes could have contributed to the global decline in the labor share. […] Labor share is defined as the share of gross value-added paid to labor and can be measured at the level of the firm or the economy.
Shareholders often take the biggest hit from corporate taxes. Consumers can to, but in most cases I think it's primarily the shareholders. But it will vary depending on the business and the market.
> Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers.
Perhaps, but that's not really how it works. The market price doesn't care how much it costs to make a particular good, it's just the market price. If you raise prices in order to pass on new costs, fewer people will buy your stuff.
Put another way, if consumers would tolerate higher prices, corporations would already be charging those higher prices.
The more competitive the market, the less that companies are able to pass on income tax increases (as opposed to input tax increases - like tariffs). If companies are able to pass along income tax increases, it means that they have pricing power.
According to that, corporate taxes are passed through at a rate of .24. And the pass-thru decreases as there’s more competition and for cheaper goods. In other words it’s a fairly progressive tax. Tariffs are a 100% pass-thru by definition because they’re a sales tax. This hits lower income people the hardest (unless we only tariff luxury goods).
Aren’t terrifs paid by the importer? Most consumers aren’t importing goods afaik. So it seems like there are still margins that can be eaten into to avoid 100% pass through.
2. Reduce defense overall and make the process of getting money to the needy more efficient.
3. No comment. Healthcare is mess.
4. Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers. I'm in favor of tax reform, but thinking that taxing corporations is a way to stick it to rich people is shortsighted, IMO.