Wal-Mart in recent years, as a large corporate retailer, has basked in the 5% of tax subsidies out of all tax subsidies our social corporatist nation has handed out to large corporations. Wal-Mart’s take has been in the neighborhood of 2.5 BILLION dollars.
These are only federal level tax breaks. There are untold dollars in state, city, and local tax breaks that these companies control due to concessions given for “building in our town.”
Wal-Mart is also an international corporation with the ability to keep profits overseas, get credits on that money, and then use it for depreciation costs that net them even more tax breaks.
Yahoo in 2010 made about a billion in profit, got back about 100 million in concessions, and had a MINUS 10% tax rate.
Looking again at the list, the costs for a start-up business or a small business are not those of corporate sized monster than can wrangle better prices and better tax rates from everyone.
So, the principle of “everyone gets taxed the same” is simply not taking place.
But none of that has anything to do with the issue in this thread, which is individual purchasers paying the sales tax that the state they live in requires of them.
Under current law, the obligation is shared by all, whether a company collects the tax or not. But because it is so easy to cheat, most people do, because we have apparently long since lost the moral code expressed by this statement “Who would know? I would know”. When I grew up, “I would know” was indelibly imprinted on me.
There are many ways I could break the law, or cheat my company, or cheat others — but I would know. (and God would know, of course, but this is not a religious discussion). And since I value my own honor, more than I value the money I could save, I dutifully pay my “use tax” when sales tax is not collected.
But apparently most people see a chance to not pay their taxes without getting caught, and think it’s Christmas. So because people won’t obey the law “simply because it is there”, we are stuck with finding some way to make people comply with the law.
Our country cannot survive an immoral population. Freedom requires the vast majority of citizens to do what is right because that is what they are supposed to do. We have enough police to catch the few miscreants who don’t, and to put just enough “fear of God” into the rest of the people to help them remember that they are moral people.
If any sizable number of the population decides to break the law, we would need a vastly increased police force, and would lose our liberty to the police state that follows.
IN once sense, that is the real problem with this sales tax thing. It’s not a good solution, per see — if people would just pay their use taxes, we wouldn’t need it. But when too many people are willing to break the law, it becomes a burden to those who don’t break the law.
Imagine if every person decided to run red lights EXCEPT if there were cameras to catch them. You’d have accidents all the time. Eventually, you’d have to put up traffic cameras, and then the law-abiding who on a rare instance slid through a light a bit late when there was no traffic would get a ticket.
Nobody wants the police to have radar on them all the time, but if the entire population decided to drive recklessly, this would be the result.
And we see what happens whenever you get a mob together — they realize strength in numbers, and start looting and pillaging, knowing they can’t be caught. It’s a shame.