Businesses do not pay any taxes

Pro then goes on to show how a business must take in X amount of money in order to pay Y expenses. This is, of course, identical to what people do. Perhaps Pro's conception of "out of pocket" is flawed; perhaps he sees everyone as having a trust fund from which they draw. This debate is not about people. It is about business but people would have higher salaries if the taxes did not come out but that is obvious. By the logic he employs, no one pays taxes, everyone just collects them. You are forgetting something. If Joe Sixpack gets his after tax paycheck and then pays for XYZ Business's products, he is paying some of XYZ taxes on money of his that has already been taxed. This means he is paying taxes twice on the same money he earned once. The point is that customers pay all of a business's bills. Without a customer buying their product, there is no money to pay for overhead, labor and taxes. When you hear someone say that Walmart or Exxon or whatever need to pay more money in taxes, you know you are hearing someone speak out of sheer ignorance on this subject and I don't care if they have 10 master's degrees in economics. Why do I say that? Because when the ignorant speaker says the rich businesses need to pay more taxes (no amount is ever enough for this mindset), what they are really saying is:"I want XYZ corporation to raise their prices and so we consumers can pay higher prices at the cash register and so they can in turn pay the government more money in taxes." Pro makes a sweeping generalization here. As with most sweeping generalizations, it lacks validity. This is not a generalization. It is a fact of life. As I pointed out, taxes are a cost of doing business and who pays for a business's products so that they can have a business? The consumers. Therefore, it is not a generalization that a consumer pays a company's taxes. It is a fact. If you cannot see it...well.There are corporations who paid ZERO taxes.[1] Corporations are entities which spend money on more things than simply the necessities. Hold on. You are venturing off into another direction. What a corporation wants to spend its legally earned money on is their business. They are not charities and you have no business deciding what is a "necessity." That Pro argues that raising taxes would necessarily raise prices is absurd. Why not just ask any business owner what would happen if their costs of doing business increased and they wanted to try to keep their profits and their employees salaries the same? What do you think he will say? Keeping prices the same is the wrong answer. Now, if he wants to take a cut in the overall business's profits, sure he can do that but most businesses do not want to think that way. The purpose of a person starting a business is to grow it. It could just as easily cut into the millions of dollars CEOs get paid per year. Especially considering the US has such a wild difference between CEO and average worker pay, as compared to other countries. [2] You are showing wealth envy now. Why does it matter to you personally what a CEO gets paid provided the company that legally earned that money wants to pay him? The direction you are going is beyond this debate. It is not for you to decide what a CEO gets paid. It also assumes that all pay is exactly where it "should" be, which is also not true. Who are you to decide what anyone's pay "should" be?If a company wants to stay competitive, it will not raise prices unless it has to. While companies COULD raise their prices to make up for every dollar in taxes, they're unlikely to. If they want to make what they were making before, they will. If the taxes keep going up (a liberal's dream), they will. It also depends on how much competition there is. In no way does it help you or me for the government to raise taxes on a business. It only can lead to more money out of our pockets. You do acknowledge that you are not benefitting when someone else's taxes are raised don't you? And further, even granting the assumption that Pro makes, he's still asking for the customers of Company A to subsidize the profits of Company B, even if they don't use Company B's product! When did I say any such thing?The presumption that less profits NECESSARILY increases prices is absurd on its face, in a world where Corporate <em>profits</em> are so high, and those profits go only to the top. It's not as though lowering taxes necessarily leads to <em>decreased</em> prices. I am speaking in general terms and never said "all businesses increase all prices every single time their tax rate goes up even slightly." That is not what I am saying. I am simply saying that a tax increase is putting a business in a situation where their costs are increased. Therefore, sooner or later, prices are almost certain to go up depending on other costs (up or down) and how much their taxes went up and the competition. They sure are not going down. Business don't go "Hey, our taxes went up. Let's lower prices." Corporate profits are "so high?" Now, you are generalizing. A corporation can be some guy (like me) with an Ebay business who filled out some forms and incorporated. Some lose money. Corporations are profit making machines. They will <em>always</em> make as much profit as they possibly can, which is limited only by their competition and their consumers' willingness to consume. Name me someone who does not want to make as much profit as they can. Just being a corporation does not mean big profits. Otherwise, every tiny business in the world would incorporate. I mean, honestly, does Pro really think that the Oil Companies would be utterly forced to raise prices if they didn't make a (combined between the top 5) $1 TRILLION dollars in profits between 2001 and 2011? I love talking about the oil companies so I am glad you brought this up. Oil companies raise prices of their products all the time for all the reasons I stated in the first round. As for their profits, do you know how much money they make on a gallon of gas? It is hard to find this info anywhere but most speculators believe it to be 7-10 cents! Read that again. Do your own research. Now, what does the government who does absolutely nothing to produce that gallon of gas make per gallon? I hope you are sitting down - about 50 cents per gallon. That is about 7 times more than the oil companies make and yet, I can bet you that thinkprogress will not report those numbers. I bet NPR will not either and neither will The Young Turks or moveon.org. I guess you would like for the oil companies to apologize for selling something that they make that is in so much demand that people are willing to buy mass amounts of it and they are sitting on pennies per gallon profits and you are talking down at them? Sorry, I don't understand that. I hope you never start a business that gets to this level and have to absorb criticism for doing your job so well. http://mnprager.wordpress.com... Considering about half the money they spent was on things which solely enriched "their board, senior managers, and largest share holders"? [3] Again, how is that your business how a private company spends its money? Let me look through your house and decide what things you really did not need to spend your money on. Would you want that?[2] http://creativeconflictwisdom.wordpress.com......[3] http://thinkprogress.org...... It is telling that 2 or the 3 links you used were definitely liberal sites. The thinkprogress link in general had nothing do do with this debate but was just a long rant about oil company profits and how they spend their money. Here is a link to how the US government spends money and I can assure you, the oil companies have nothing on them and I should point out that oil companies earn their money. http://www.heritage.org...