Leopards Ate My Face

Public corporations should not be taxed based on declared revenue. Instead, a portion of shares should be owned by the public such that taxes are paid by dividends.

Also, any direct funding or “stimulus” from the federal government should purchase additional shares. The government’s failure to demand equity on behalf of its people when increasing their shared national debt to fund large corporations would be considered gross fiduciary negligence in any other funding scenario. For example, full bailouts should result in a controlling stake, i.e. nationalization.

It eliminates poverty, easily solves a truckload of difficulties we have taxing these corporations and their shareholders, promotes overall economic health, and is above all more fair to everyone, including the wealthiest.

Specifically:

1. If shareholders are paid, taxes are paid. It would no longer be possible for a company like Amazon to have $0 tax liability while at the same time distributing revenue to its shareholders.
2. It skips the “trickle down” step. Share appreciation is reflected directly and automatically in public equity growth, so if the paper wealth of the richest citizen increases, so does the paper wealth of the poorest.
3. It prevents runaway capitalism, the situation we find ourselves in, where a government is too anemic to reign in corporate greed and the public servants within it too starved to resist corruption.
4. It offers more direct control of inflation, since the Fed can simply not reinvest a portion of dividends paid on shares.
5. It makes Universal Basic Income (UBI) trivially easy to implement, since what we are describing is essentially a universal pension fund that everyone has fractional shares in.

Most importantly WRT principle, it more accurately reflects the value afforded to every public company by the actual public; i.e., the society in which it operates.