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We subsidize a lot of things we may not realize

Company decides to brick a popular product? Who picks up the landfill tab?

Your electricity one is a good example

Hell, even RTO - SF offered some pretty nice tax incentives for companies who enforced RTO to “revive” the city. Who pays for this? They did a great job keeping those on the DL

I only know because I happened be involved in those conversations on the periphery - it was no coincidence we started an RTO policy right as we got a huge, huge new office



Given that the biggest companies never pay their fair share of taxes, it'll be more difficult to point out what we dont't subsidize.


what is the fair share and why cannot it not just be paid on the individual side by capital gains on share holders or wage income for workers?


> just be paid on the individual side by capital gains

When you are rich enough you can just borrow using your wealth as collateral and never incur in capital gains.


You will have had to pay taxes on the money you use to pay off the loan.


not if it is just another loan


agreed but imo this is orthogonal to corporate taxation and needs a mark2market solution, at minimum when an asset is used as collateral.


> what is the fair share

Let's start by saying the amount they would pay if lobbying was what it was meant to be and not an overtly corrupt shitshow

> why cannot it not just be paid on the individual side by capital gains on share holders or wage income for workers

Ah right, the trickle down economics, forgot about that. I'm sure that will work out well


my comment is just a recognition that corporations are a polite fiction and all taxes are ultimately incident on individuals, the same as any economist would tell you. taxes on the rich should be higher, agreed.


One I'm particularly angry about is the deallocation of resources into keeping rail transport in favor of using trucks on nearly free highways.


What makes you believe highways are nearly free? Do all those people doing highway maintenance not get paid?

Also, road wear scales with the fourth power of axle load. This means a 3-axle 30-tonne truck causes 15.000 times the wear of a 2-axle 2-tonne car. Even if highways are currently "nearly free" to maintain with a car-dominated traffic mix, moving all that rail transport into heavy trucks is going to rapidly make highway maintenance costs explode.


I think they agreed with you and were commenting that the roads aren’t tolled to pay for construction or maintenance.


not to mention the implicit subsidy in gas prices. the problem is these subsidies are popular with the electorate


it would be a subsidy to deliver power at below equilibrium price to residents simply because they are residents and not a corporate buyer. raising prices for consumers when demand comes from elsewhere is not a subsidy.




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