He\’s telling us why companies should pay taxes:
Equally, David Cameron and George Osborne\’s quest to limit the now rampant corporate abuse of tax havens is not because they believe that the state is a force for good whose services everyone must legitimately pay for – that taxation is a badge of citizenship.
But companies are not citizens. No, legal personality is not the same as natural personailty. We have legal personality because it allows one to sue and be sued: and we like the idea that we are able to sue companies. A company does not, for example, have the right to vote. It is not a citizen therefore: and so, by Willy\’s formulation, should not be paying tax.
Quite apart from hte fact that they don\’t pay tax: because tax incidence. Making the mantra that they should nonsense anyway.
I am rather embarrassed to make this little quibble – especially as it may be seen as an endorsement of Willy. Which I do not do. However ….
A company does not, for example, have the right to vote.
http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/about-the-city/how-we-work/elections-and-wards/Pages/city-of-london-ward-elections.aspx
Oooh! I pay taxes! Where’s my badge?
…Oh right. Nowhere, because this dumb argument always falls apart when one remembers that immigrants exist.
The big corporations do not have the right to vote but neither do they need to vote ,having fixed the political parties and the Press. Heard of the (latest) lobbying scandal? MP’s are allowed to take payment for consultancy with large commercial interests but still manage to infringe the by no means stringent rules.
So “everyone” must pay taxes must they? Because “taxation is a badge of citizenship”
So if your earnings in a year are beneath this year’s Personal Allowance, you’re not a citizen? Aha Mr Htton will cry, “there are other taxes you pay”. Yes indeed there are, just as companies pay over VAT, Employer’s NIC, Business Rates and coutless other taxes. An infantile argument that sounds so very reasonable.
DBC Reed
Indeed, so the logical thing to do is scrap company taxes. That way there is no incentive at all for companies to be involved in lobbing on taxation. The more control the government has over business, the more businesses will feel the need to lobby. It’s un-democratic in my view and the only real solution is to simply remove the need to business to spend money this way.
It’s not the ‘latest’ scandal btw, it’s been going on for decades.