[Rhodes22-list] Taxes.

[DCLewis1 at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/11/2006 10:29:36 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
flybrad at gmail.com writes:

MJM,

You are correct.  Companies don't pay taxes.   They build the cost of taxes
in to the cost of their goods and services and  the consumer pays the taxes.
When companies distribute profits, the  shareholders (who are the ones who
pay taxes to begin with) are taxed  again.  It really is that simple.

Brad



Michael,
 
It's a dark, dreary, and rainy day, what better time to discuss  taxes.  At 
any rate, to comment on your and Brad's exchange.
 
The real reason corporations don’t pay taxes is that they have legions of  
lawyers that pursue every tax dodge imaginable (not that individual taxpayers  
don’t do the same thing).  I recall 2 years ago Warren Buffet pointed out  in 
his annual letter that his company, Berkshire Hathaway, paid 2% of  all federal 
corporate taxes paid that year.  That’s one single corporation,  and there 
are multiple thousands of other corporations in the country.   Buffet’s point 
was that most corporations do not pay a lot of  taxes.   Corporations pay a lot 
of taxes in nominal terms, but as a fraction of  their gross it is not very 
much money.  Example:  I’m sitting here  looking at the 2005 annual report for 
Leucadia Corp, they paid no federal taxes  at all in 2005 on a gross of $1.04 
billion, in fact they list a $1 billion tax  "benefit" in their accounting, and 
they show a net profit after all charges and  expenses of roughly $1.6 
billion.  From an accounting perspective  Leucadia made money from their income tax 
- this is not as crazy as you  might think.
 
As for taxes on profits distributed to shareholders by corporations, that's  
a joke.  Pick your favorite public company (i.e. stock), what's the "profit  
distributed to shareholders" (i.e. dividend) - in the large majority of  
publicly listed companies the "profit distributed to shareholders" is ZERO  or very 
nearly zero, it's all reinvested or becomes a part of the CEO  compensation 
package and the individual shareholder has zero  effective input to that process.
 
If we're going to tax corporations, I think we need an  AMT.  Corporations 
have been pretty effective at ducking taxes  for a long time.
 
Dave