The Tax Foundation lectures Barack Obama on the basics of public finance:
Throughout the debate, Sen. Obama repeatedly showed an unfortunate ignorance of one of the fundamental principles of taxation: all taxes are paid by people. On multiple occasions, Obama claimed that businesses or corporations “can afford” to pay higher taxes. But such a statement is just ridiculous. Companies have no “ability to pay” taxes. Does the corporation’s building pay the tax? How about its fax machine or water cooler? No. People pay the taxes. [...]
What Sen. Obama doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to tell the American public is that when Exxon Mobil writes that check to Uncle Sam, some PERSON is paying the price for that. In the short-run, that person could be a shareholder, a worker, or a consumer. But the fact that Exxon Mobil has a lower after-tax profit means that some PERSON is worse off. For example, Exxon Mobil would likely reduce its dividend payment, or its share price could fall, and that hurts every PERSON who was invested in Exxon Mobil at the time the tax was enacted.
B-b-b-b-but they’d all be rich people, right?
(Via Greg Mankiw.)
Filed under: taxation
Yes, John, they’d all be rich people.
Magical rich people who, wishing to remain so, would find some evil, greedy way to make us regular folks pay.
I’d have to ask if Corporations are not individuals then why do they get more rights than most individuals?
I’m perfectly happy with the suggestions that corporations have too many rights (or “rights”, depending on how you parse things). But that doesn’t change the fact that any taxes on a corporation will be spread out among flesh-and-blood persons, and Obama’s just bullshitting when he tries to pretend otherwise.