Why should I vote Democratic?

[hfojvt]

53. it's not about making it a better business

For myself, I worry less about corporate taxes than I do about individual taxes. Corporations have a lot of "perfectly legal" ways to avoid taxes.

Now some individuals are being taxed on their business income, and that CAN be quite onerous.

Take, for example, my own bookstore that I opened and ran for 7 years. In my ideal world, I would have been able to make a living at that.

Let's say "a living" is $12,340, which is what I made working at the satellite dish factory in 1994 (that was the full time job I worked to support my business in its 3rd year. Suppose instead of working two jobs, that I made that income from my store. Well, as a wage earner, I pay $944.01 in FICA taxes, but as a self employed person, I would pay $1,888.02 in FICA taxes, because I have to pay the employer side as well.

But that has nothing to do with things like the Bush tax cuts.

Now, if your business gives you more than $100,000 in income, then in my view it is not really "small". It is not gargantuan like a Wal-mart or even a Walgreens, but it isn't small like mine either.

Take the satellite dish factory where I worked. It had about 200 employees and was owned by John Kaul. I have no idea what his personal income was, but he did pretty good. One of my co-worers was commenting about how well he lived. But one thing about numbers is that if he even gave us a 10 cent an hour raise (which would be almost nothing) that would cost him $40,000 a year.

But let's say he's making $400,000 a year and thus gets nailed with those higher taxes that Obama is insisting upon (so far). First of all, he still gets to keep the Bush tax cuts on his first $250,000 in income. Which is a substantial savings. For a single person, the tax on $250,000 in AGI in 2001 was $76,564.75 in 2008 it was only $68,250.75 - $8,314 less. http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hfojvt/103

His taxes would go up by a mere $13,941.9m but still be $8,314 less than they were pre-Bush. And in the last ten years, he'd have gotten $222,550 in tax cuts.

Well, back in 1994, he paid more taxes than that on the same income. It is hardly gonna kill him to pay those taxes again. In fact, in some ways more taxes are an incentive to hire. I mean, I used to put in 50+ hour weeks at my business. Well, if my extra income is gonna be taxed away, then that is an incentive to hire somebody else to do the work. After all, if I pay them $30,000 a year, then that is money that I am not paying taxes on. The higher the tax rate, the greater the incentive. If, for example, the tax rate is 80% then it only costs me $6,000 to hire that new person, but if the tax rate is 30%, then it costs me $21,000 to hire that new person.