Authoritatively stating that inventory taxes are the reason for JIT won't make it the truth. Read a bit more for why Toyota actually came up with the concept. Inventory management is about efficiency. Even if entirely and completely untaxed, you want JIT to make sure your production is not over capacity and you aren't wasting money.
Inventory taxes inform the decisions of every business I have done work for. Without the taxes we would carry a few months of parts. But we can't. It's too expensive.
This was not a black and white statement. You need to read better. I said JIT was not created for the sake of inventory taxes. JIT doesn't exist just for the sake of inventory taxes either. Why would someone tax small stocks of inventory enough to justify pure JIT?
The bigger reason is to turnover your inventory faster and use cash more efficiently. The most basic of finance education would tell you about this. There are measures of this called inventory turnover, just as there are measures for turnover on many many things inside a company that gives an idea of how efficiently they use cash. I have never in my life seen a financial model on the face of the planet consider inventory taxes primarily because they're a non factor. Income taxes are a much bigger factor.
I have read about the original case for JIT. Toyota and others, for example, do not hold the parts but bully their suppliers into holding them. They implicitly recognise the need for maintaining inventory but have forced someone else to bear the costs of maintaining it.
HN is not usually biased against taxes which is the subtext I see in your original post. There are bad policies and unintended consequences to some taxes.
Ah no. My subtext was complete idiocy of HN on anything outside the immediate area of computing and software. Not about taxes in particular. I don't hang out around here often enough to recognize bias within specific topics.
One of the things that turned me off of using Amazon for fulfillment when I was trying to run a barely ramen profitable hardware startup was that I might get stuck filing property taxes in a whole bunch of states. That and I was so broke that I could only afford to ship one box of inventory to one destination, and they insisted on splitting into multiple different warehouses.
Can you show a jurisdiction that bad inventory taxes please?
there is a phrase inventory tax that means unnecessary overhead but I’ve never come across an actual governmental inventory tax in any country or us state.
Anywhere in the US. Some locations are worse than others for property taxes.
I'm in a red state with relatively tame property taxes but the taxes that do exist that count inventory as property prevent us from keeping appreciable inventory. Everything is a minimum 3 week lead time to buy and produce, usually more. I am pretty sure JIT slows down the economy in general.
Usual hackernews bullshit.