My grandmother isn't going to want to buy a PC and configure Linux herself. She'll just get an Apple. Once enough users move to Apple, we'll all have to learn Objective C and our workstations will be a bunch of ipads.

Imagine targeted penis enlargement ads!

Reading this post made me feel dirty.

The difference is that when you make someone who starts up a business pay all of the country's taxes, they're forced to simply pass that along to consumers as higher prices. The consumers pay the taxes regardless, always. Businesses can't exist without people buying their goods and services.

It's better than EncryptoBarn or KeyHaul.

If you start with PHP, even Brainfuck looks fun and refreshing. Jesus pal, talk about damning a language with faint praise.

Another attempt by a vendor to try to lock in software development and make cross platform development incredibly difficult by introducing a new language.

Fuck, I do tire of the sociopathic tendencies of corporations.

Indeed. And quite often even dead FOSS projects can be cannibalized. The difference between dead open source and dead closed source projects is that the bones of one sit in an open pit that anyone can pick at, and the other sits in a concrete bunker twenty miles underground.

Yes, and most cases such services are paid through property taxes. If the company owns the plant and its grounds, they pay substantial property taxes. If they lease the property, the property's owner does (and passes those costs along in the lease).

We're not talking about property taxes, we're talking about income taxes.

Right. Just the other day the Motley Fool published effective tax rates. That takes into account not just federal taxes but aveerage state/provincial tales and other tax-related burdens that actually get paid in real life by actual companies doing actual business in all the countries they list. The effective rate for businesses in the US is 40%. The second highest, behind only the UAE.

Right. Usually, that's because:

1) We want people to risk their money making investments to start and grow businesses. That creates economic activity, which is taxed.

2) If the person risking their money on such an investment loses it (as most do - most new businesses fail), they do NOT get to write that loss off on their own income taxes. It's just gone, goodbye. 3) The lower rates only apply if you let the investment site for a good long time. Those who throw money in and yank it back up pay a much higher rate.

Employees ARE people who profit from a business. In fact employees account for the vast majority of the outbound cash that most businesses spend. And its taxed at normal payroll rates. And the taxes levied on the money those people are getting out of the company are a big part of what pays for the public infrastructure that they (as the people who are making money daily in the business) use. Why do you think that city, county, state, and federal programs to encourage business presence and growth aren't hesitant to wave, for some period of time, taxes charged directly to the business? It's because the net result of establishing that business in place and keeping it there is MUCH MORE TAX REVENUE - from all of the other activity and employment that results.

How would jacking up income tax rates help with that problem? It only makes it worse.

But the company doesn't do anything with the money except spend it on growing the company, or in compensation to employees and investors. When those investors or employees take money home from the company, it's taxed. And if those same people take that already taxed money and invest it that or another company, and it makes money, they get taxed again.

The company doesn't benefit from services and education, etc., the people WHO TAKE HOME THE MONEY do (at which point it's taxed). They other group that benefits are company's customers, who spend money (on which they've already paid other taxes) to buy goods or services from that company. And that means nothing until, again, somebody takes it home as pay (taxed) or dividends (taxed) or cashed out stocks (taxed).

The company's actual profits shouldn't be taxed because all that money does is sit there until somebody either spends it on the company as reinvestment (which isn't taxed anyway), or it gets turned over to somebody designated to receive it - at which point it IS taxed as income.

Of course they will, if they're competing with companies that operate elsewhere with a 15% lower tax rate.

You mean, like Canada? It has a 26% rate, compared the US's 40% rate. Yeah, third-world hell holes like Canada always whore around with those low numbers, right?