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The thing is, even if you believed that the government would do a reasonable job of investing, the money is either going to come from issuing bonds (increasing the supply of attractive low risk investments and proportionally decreasing the attractiveness of high risk investments which cause growth), or they're going to already have it from taxation, much of which has come from money that would have been invested anyway.

While I'm certainly more in favour of the government giving e.g. entrepreneural low interest loans than bank bailouts, I can't help but think that the money would have been better spent had it never been removed from circulation in the first place.

How about getting entirely rid of tax on businesses until they issue dividends? So the money only gets taxed when it's withdrawn as profit (and this itself is only necessary to tax foreign investors). Businesses are on average quite profitable, so why take away money that they're planning to reinvest? It will almost certainly be reinvested wisely (because they were already profitable, they presumably know what they're doing).




Taxing /only/ dividends is not a bad idea. It will prevent the kind of CEO salary run up we have seen in the past few decades as well.


No it won't. CEO salary is an expense. Dividends come after expenses.

FWIW, CEO earnings exploded because of a restriction on CEO salary. If that's a surprise....




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