rogers park bryan wrote:
leashyourkids wrote:
rogers park bryan wrote:
leashyourkids wrote:
rogers park bryan wrote:
denisdman wrote:
Trickle down is just a loaded political term. Here is how any real corporate finance person thinks about allocating capital:
Everything is done with an eye towards payback period (how long to recover your investment) and IRR/NPV. The IRR is the rate of return on the project and must clear an internal hurdle rate. For most businesses the hurdle rate is 10-12%, which is their cost of capital. The NPV is simply another way to look at IRR and shows how profitable a project is above your cost of capital in dollar terms.
Businesses discount the cash flow at their cost of capital. The cash flow is directly impacted by the corporate tax rate. If a project expects to generate $10M per year in pretax income, here is the impact:
at 35%, they will have $6.5M in profits/cash flow.
at 20%, they will have $8M in profits/cash flow.
As such, at 20%, more projects will clear the hurdle rate. It is a massive difference and creates a lot of extra business activity. The same logic applies to acquisition, investments, and plenty other areas where the tax calculation is part of the discounted cash flow analysis.
So you do believe in what is known as trickle down economics, then?
To be fair, I'm not sure how someone would "believe" in trickle down economics. What does "believing" in trickle down economics mean? a 40% tax rate? A 70% tax rate? All of us must "believe" in trickle down economics to some extent or we'd be Communist.
I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Just because a class system exists doesn't mean its good for the bottom.
It pretty much depends on the theory that if you cut taxes for the wealthy, they will spend more, invest/innovate more and a lot of that will benefit the bottom.
I think most economic experts conclude it does not work.
Well, of course it works to some extent. If it didn’t, then you’re arguing in favor of Communism. That’s fine if you are. I just thought your question was poorly worded. So fuck you!
You're confused or I'm confused and not understanding what you're saying. This is specifically about tax cuts to one specific group and how it affects the rest.
Your original question asked Denis if he "believed in trickle down economics". I guess my point is that, even though you didn't intent it to be, it's kind of a loaded question that can't be answered.
"Trickle Down Economics", to my knowledge, is the belief that tax cuts to businesses and wealthier individuals will ultimately benefit the poor. So, my problem with the way you worded it is that it's very vague. Are you asking if he believes in "Trickle Down Economics"
right now? If so, it would just be better to ask him if he thinks taxes should be lowered, and if so, what ones. If the tax rate on businesses was 99%, I'm pretty sure you would "believe" in trickle down economics too because we would have no businesses in existence. But I'm assuming that you don't consider yourself a fan of trickle down economics because you believe the current tax rates are sufficient, or perhaps you even think some of them should be raised. The current tax rates are arbitrary. They're not a magical, "right" number, so an individual could believe that lowering them would stimulate the economy and benefit everyone without necessarily being some sort of economic Libertarian or fan of trickle down economics.
My point about Communism is that if you extent out what "trickle down economics" really is (tax cuts for businesses/wealthy), it's really just capitalism. What does "tax cuts" really mean? It means lowering taxes from the current arbitrary number that we've assigned previously. And we live in a Capitalistic country in which we allow free markets. If we didn't all believe in "trickle down economics" at least a little bit, we would just raise taxes to 100% and eliminate free markets.
Overall, my point is essentially what Dennis pointed out. "Trickle down economics" is a politically charged term (on both sides) that is usually misrepresented and isn't really specific about what it means. I just thought a better question would be "what do you think tax rates ought to be?"
What were we arguing about?
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Curious Hair wrote:
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