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.

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?

There are other ways to generate more tax revenue from business operations in the US: quit making elsewhere so much more attractive. The US has the second highest effective business tax burden in the world (second only to the United Arab Emerates, which mostly taxes foreign oil operations). Gee, I wonder why businesses born in the US look to mitigate that in whatever ways the law allows. If the law no longer allows it, there will simply be more companies actually moving, entirely, to places with a lower burden. Then the government will still miss the revenue, and they'll miss all the tax revenue they're already getting on the income taxes levied on and other economic activity generated by all of the company's current domestic employees, partners, vendors, service providers, etc.

Grrr.

Sure if thing A is inexpensive, then thing B which costs a fraction of that price might indeed be said to cost X times less. Implying that thing A is already less than some other option, and thing B is even MORE less.

But if thing A is very expensive (as in the example cited in TFA), thing B would be better described as being not a hundred times less ... but one hundredth the cost.

So, let's see ... the administration publishes a written interpretation of a law they don't like, and you think it's crazy to report that fact?

Obviously it's nothing new for the Obama administration to simply ignore statutory requirements (see his unilateral re-writing of features of the ACA entirely for political expediency), and this is simply another case of it. But what's interesting is that you are obviously either ignorant of their specific language in the new "interpretation" of the law in question, or you're well aware of the implications and are just doing your best to wish it away through childish ad hominem. Classic lefty sycophantism. Or, I'll just give you the benefit of the doubt, and tell you to go read their published intention to twist the law into an implementation that is 180 degrees opposite to its plain, so you can come back here and argue the details instead of stamping your feet like an eight year old girl.

Out of hundreds of such discussions that pop up on easy Google searches ...

http://www.modelaircraft.org/a...

It's not a conspiracy, coward. It's published policy. Your decision to trot out ad hominem in place of addressing the basic facts of the matter shows you know I'm right. That you're posting as a coward makes it even more clear. But keep propping up your pet administration, man. The documents they publish - you know, the ones that have been amply covered in both aviation news and general media of all sorts - make this all very clear. The agency has just been sued by multiple parties over the 'interpretation' document and policy position in question. But please, don't trouble yourself to keep up with the news - that would take the fun out of your shrill, drooling Obama fanboyism.

You actually need a citation to believe that the director of the FAA is a political appointee? You are that unaware of how federal agencies are run by the executive branch of the government? You don't need a citation, you need a remedial course in basic civics. Please return to the conversation when you understand the basic structure of the government.

Yes, and congress passed a law requiring the FAA to produce such regulations in a timely fashion due in this coming year. The administration has said they will not obey that law, and will not have such a framework in anything like the timely fashion required.

In the meantime, the administration has published an "interpretation" of the 2012 law that says they take it to mean more or less the exact opposite of its plain intent, and they are busy getting ready to fine people for doing things like participating in RC competitions (you know, like we've been having for decades) that happen to involve things like $20 cash prizes ... because that's commercial drone use! The employees of US-based companies that have for years stepped out back of their shops to test-fly a new RC airplane or multirotor will, according to the Obama administration's new interpretation, be breaking the law and subject to substantial fines for being paid to fly unmanned aerial systems. We can't have that! Quick! Shut down all of those businesses and jobs! Chase those retailers out of the country!

It's preposterous. We're not just dragging behind the rest of the world, we're actively taking steps backwards. The administration is deliberately, purposefully, putting the brakes on what would otherwise be a multi-billion dollar industry full of innovation and attractive to STEM-types in this country. The left's instinct to Nanny State their way down into every last aspect of what someone might do to conduct some business (hey, kid, quit flying your $250, 2-pound plastic quad-copter with a cheap camera over your neighbor's roof because he asked you to, and said he'd give you $25 to get pictures of his roof gutters for him - if you don't cease and desist such commercial UAV operations, that's going to be a $10,000 fine!) means they can't simply clone the sort of framework that the UK or Canada have long had in place ... no, there's got to be a way to make it all MORE miserable, MORE expensive, MORE punitive, and nearly impossible for small entrepreneurs to get into - because otherwise we might miss out on some more federal fees, and intrusive paperwork.

And as usual, the very idiots that we'd most worry about anyway, who will be getting a drone from Amazon tomorrow and flying it over a park full of kids an hour later without any understanding of safe operations or good manners, will completely ignore the FAA's rules/guidance/regs anyway. The government, which is here to help you, will only be placing the painful burden and expense on the very people who are the most responsible anyway: those with a lot to lose because they're in business to use the technology.

More Hope and Change, hard at work for our economy. Yes, Obama's man Huerta at the FAA is a political appointee and that aspect of the food chain lays the FAA's entire posture on this squarely at the door of the White House.