Why SHOULD a cargo van have higher import taxes than a passenger van, other than to serve the needs of some random private company?
Even moreso, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ford lobbied FOR those laws before changing its mind in where to produce a particular sku
It's the same game that SaaS companies play. Everything is free until you want SSO, then it's $30,000 a year. If you need SSO, you can afford it.
Personally, I hate this in both cases. I think we could save everyone a lot of time if every vendor you did business with just grabbed you by the ankles and flipped you upside down and took whatever money fell out of your pocket. Why tiptoe around what they really want...
I'm confused about this statement. Businesses are comprised of individuals, and those individuals (if citizens) can vote. So the business has a vote through the voice of its employees and representation in government through the people employees at a business.
Or are you saying the legal fiction of business personhood should give the business a ... vote? That just sounds like business owners (individuals) getting 2 or more votes then...
I believe the more common proposal is to resolve the contradiction the other way: remove taxes on corporations, as the individuals comprising the corporations generally already pay taxes. That would be politically quite unpopular, but there is a certain logic to it and it would also make taxes easier to administer and more difficult to avoid. And it doesn't need to be as pro-rich as it sounds - you could just replace corporation taxes with other taxes targeting wealthy individuals, such as a wealth tax or higher income taxes.
So while a business doesn't pay sales on the fuel they need to deliver their goods to me, it gets paid in the end because the cost of the fuel is included in the price I pay and the sales tax is levied on the whole purchase price.
(It is a little more complicated than that. Don't sue me.)
Without a wealth tax that would just make tax evasion even easier for the ultrawealthy in the usual manner of borrowing against the equity of the stock they own.
why go through the hassle of voting and deal with uncertainty whether you voted a right person, when you can just buy with cash whatever law/regulation you need
Have you read a tariff schedule? They're full of this stuff, which seem to be protections or favors for specific industries. Anti-dumping protections seem similar.
That's from the 'further reading' link on Wikipedia.
The EU has banned poultry meat from the US on psytosanitary grounds for more than two decades.
For some context: it is about washing chicken meat with chlorine dioxide to kill bacteria, especially salmonella, at the slaughterhouse. It may seem ridicoulous that europeans prefer salmonella to chlorine on their chickens, but european food health and safety argues that the practice is needed in the USA due to the very unsanitary, and therefor cheaper, chicken meat production, whereas europa requires high standards during production instead of washing the end product in chlorine, and is therefore more costly. Some argue this cost difference is the major driver of the ban, and it is not an actual health and safety issue.
Running for reelection and aware of the influence the U.A.W. had in Congress and in the minds of voters, President Johnson looked for a way to persuade Reuther’s union not to strike and to support his “Great Society” civil rights agenda. Johnson succeeded on both counts by agreeing to include light trucks in the Chicken Tax.
While U.S. tariffs on other Chicken Tax items have since been rescinded, lobbying efforts by the U.A.W. have kept the tariff on light trucks and utility vans alive. As a result, American-made trucks still dominate sales in the U.S., and some very desirable trucks, like the high-end Australian-made Volkswagen Amorak, are not sold in the United States.
Its incredible to me that there's an entire political identity that borderline denies any of this happens, and instead the government itself is somehow naturally corrupt but business and the lobbying and capital owning class are all angels and saints. Everyday conservatism buys into this fallacy fairly well and this dishonesty seems to be the core of libertarianism.
Explaining this concept to some people feels like how I would imagine explaining water to fish must be. We're just so surrounded by it and it defines so much of our culture, that you can fail to see if you choose. You can just call everything government corruption from cradle to grave without asking about the source and motivation of that corruption. You can swim your whole life and never wonder why you're wet.
