2. Does it not stand to reason that in general when you raise taxes there is a corresponding reduction in profits? Nobody makes more money when their tax burden goes up, common sense tells us that. Your overhead expenses went up but your revenues didn't
Gross profit, vs net profit... Gross is before taxes owed are paid.
They can make more net profit, even with higher taxes. If they increase sales, with the same fixed expenses and cost of goods, a corporation can make more profit in dollar terms, so that a higher tax rate on profit, can still net you more profit dollars than the previous year, with smaller volume and lower tax rates.
a. For some companies that reduction in profits means it ain't worth it to stay in business, the risks outweigh the rewards at some point. As state above, not every company can operate more efficiently than they already are, so they have to resort to other avenues. From cutting the number of employees to the number of hours worked per employee, to reducing their benefits to automating to moving to a RTW state or overseas if feasible to raising prices of the market will bear it
Profit, is profit. It means you've paid every single bill, big and small, every salary and every bonus, and bought your materials for future product etc, then basically, what is left over, is the gravy....the taxable profit.... If they reinvest in to growing the business, all of that comes out of the gross profit or borrowed and is not taxable income.
b. For investors in new startups, higher taxes means less reward (profit). Everybody does a cost/benefit analysis before deciding to invest their money, and when you increase the cost then you have tilted the decision away from investing in a new business. You are in effect discouraging the creation of more jobs, and the same holds true for expansions of existing businesses. If there enough profit there, or should an investor put his/her/their money elsewhere for a better return.
In general, new start ups don't make a profit and they pay no taxes for the first 2 to 5 years....or longer, if they have no profit, to tax. But we are not talking about startups, we are talking C corporations, with share holders / on the stock exchange / wall street.
c. "These type of things are done, to avoid owing higher taxes from a higher tax rate". You bet your ass they are, but the reality is that many businesses don't have the wiggle room to do anything else but raise prices. Maybe they do the other things you mentioned but it isn't enough, especially when so many small business owners will be affected by the higher tax rates that Biden wants to enact
Most all small businesses are LLCs or S Corps, or are just individual private owners and are not affected by corporate tax rates, which are public corporations, most all with shares to sell, on the stock market.
As far as your article on c corps being small businesses too.... they can't be that small, to be a C Corp... the article is a scare tactic..... Not to help out smaller businesses, but to try for some kind of sympathy so that the mostly huge, mega size corporations don't get a tax increase imho.
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Business investment is slowing, despite lofty promises, and worker bonuses were a mirage.
www.americanprogress.org
Two years ago, President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent via the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA). At the time, the Trump administration
claimed that its corporate tax cuts would increase the average household income in the United States by $4,000. But two years later, there is little indication that the tax cut is even beginning to trickle down in the ways its proponents claimed.
The Trump administration claimed its corporate tax cuts would translate into a $4,000 raise for the average household
In selling the large corporate tax cut to Congress and a skeptical American public, the Trump administration claimed that corporate tax cuts would ultimately translate into higher wages for workers. The tax cuts would trickle down to workers through a multistep process. First, slashing the corporate tax rate would increase corporations’ after-tax returns on investment, inducing them to massively boost spending on investments such as factories, equipment, and research and development. This investment boom would give the average worker more and better capital to work with, substantially increasing the overall productivity of U.S. workers. In other words, they would be able to produce more goods and services with every hour worked. And finally, U.S. workers would capture the benefits of their increased productivity by successfully bargaining for higher wages.
According to
President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), this process would “in the medium term boost the average U.S. household income annually in current dollars by at least $4,000, conservatively.” CEA’s “optimistic” estimate of the average household’s raise was $9,000. Then-CEA Chairman Kevin Hassett
claimed that it would take “three to five years” for these massive trickle-down effects to materialize. A number of critics noted that the Trump administration’s claims were unlikely to pan out, in part because they hinged on the same supply-side economics that decades of tax cuts for the wealthy have consistently discredited.
These critics emphasized a number of flaws with the CEA’s theory of the case. First, corporations were holding large amounts of cash. Second, they were able to access capital very cheaply with interest rates at historic lows for almost a decade. Third, the effective tax rates on U.S. corporate investment, especially debt-financed investment, were already quite low, indicating that the cost of capital—let alone the portion attributable to taxes—was hardly holding back corporate investment. The critics noted that greater corporate market power meant that corporate profits consisted largely of economic rents, not marginal returns on investment. Therefore, a new corporate tax cut would, even if effective, likely be passed onto shareholders rather than being reinvested by the firms receiving the tax cut. Critics emphasized further that even if the tax cuts sparked an investment boom that increased productivity, it would be far from clear whether workers would be able to capture the gains, given the power imbalances between U.S. workers and employers.
The promised boom in business investment never happened
In the year following the tax cut, business investment increased—but
not by nearly as much as the tax cut proponents’ predictions would have implied. Furthermore, a study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
concluded that the relatively healthy business investment in 2018 was driven by strong aggregate demand in the economy—not the supply-side factors that tax cut proponents used to justify the tax cut. In other words, the increase in business investment from the relatively weak 2015-2016 period seems like another example of an economic indicator returning to more-normal levels.
Worse, business investment has slowed more recently. The most recent data show that private nonresidential investment actually declined in the second quarter of 2019,
contributing to an overall slowdown in growth. Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell
pointed to the “continued softness” expected in business investment and declining output in manufacturing sector as reasons for the Fed’s recent rate cut.
Measures of the investments that companies are planning have also
declined. As analysts at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center
wrote recently, “This slowdown in business purchases of plant and equipment contrasts sharply with President Trump’s rosy forecast of a long-term investment boom that would lead to annual wage increases of $4,000 or more.” Moreover, investment in housing has declined every quarter since the passage of the tax legislation.
Instead of substantially increasing investment, the windfall businesses received largely went to paying off wealthy investors.
One analysis of Fortune 500 companies found that just 20 percent of increased cashflow in 2018 was spent on increasing capital expenditures or research and development. The remaining 80 percent of cashflow went to investors through buybacks, dividends, or other asset planning adjustments. The vast majority of corporate stocks are held by the wealthy, including
foreign investors, and thus they are the ultimate beneficiaries of the windfall corporate tax cuts.
To be sure, President Trump’s erratic pronouncements on tariffs have clearly created considerable uncertainty for businesses, leading many to hold back on investments. At this point, it is not possible to disentangle the negative effects of Trump’s misbegotten trade war from his tax policies. What we do know, however, is that nearly two years after the tax bill passed, the investment boom that was supposed to justify the corporate tax cuts—and even pay for those tax cuts over the long run—simply has not happened.