i mean, a tax break for a struggling company doing a really worthwhile thing in a worthwhile way, maybe a tax break that helps keep it afloat is a good idea.

i'm not clear on why the novelty of a business should be the all-important factor.

I'm protesting the prodigious and almost default nature of tax breaks to successful businesses. There is an unquestioned nature to these handouts from our legislators that belies their actual value. If they don't benefit society in some way, which often they don't, they just go to fattening the bottom line of some shareholders, then why are we giving, in virtual perpetuity,life long tax relief to the most wealthy among us. ( sorry about the run on sentence). How about tax deferments instead? If your business fails, it will be liable for a lower tax assessment, on the other hand if you are successful business, then you can pay back the deferred taxes that allowed you to become successful. Why should your success be a permanent penalty for the rest of society? The simple truth is that if you need tax breaks to stay in business, you are not running a successful business, you are running a drain on society. Big or small, businesses are one part of a successful society, capitalism is not supposed to rely on the beneficence of government or the general public, it is supposed to be self supporting.

ideally, congress and legislatures should carefully consider the public good, public cost, and efficacy of each tax break.

tax breaks should not go to reward things companies are doing anyway, that's just waste. much of this, of course, goes to big, already-profitable companies that can afford to play the political donations game in order to get their own tax loophole enacted.

i think we are probably in agreement, but the way you phrase it, it would seem to argue against non-profit corporations, which are (for the most part) doing good things, but often surviving thanks to a massive tax break.


the real problem is that the politics stink. namely, companies can just go around saying "jobs, jobs, jobs" and congress and legislatures throw massive amounts of money at them without bothering to notice if they're actually offshoring, hiring only a dozen people, or bringing pollution to town. all the politicians care about is the campaign contribution and the excuse to say "jobs, jobs, jobs".

Or perhaps "enterprise" or "venture."

A corporation can have a lot of businesses--some profitable, some not. But if they're going into a new one, it's no different for that portion of the corporation than it is for a start-up. The corporation provides a subsidy and may benefit from any losses it deducts from its income (note: not from its "income tax&quot . Or it may decide that the business is too risky to handle solo and seek a subsidy or some sort of tax concession (which are different things, to be sure).

Been there, done that while on the board of a non-profit corporation that had a lot of ostensibly for-profit businesses. (That's the nature of a student store/restaurant organization that has as one of its goals maximizing student employment and providing income for student programming--insufficient receipts over expenses and you don't meet the needs of your stakeholders.)

I note that you say businesses that aren't profitable should just fail. That means that if a corporation employes 20k people and one of its businesses that employes 5k people isn't profitable, it's a good thing to shut it down? (Usually if one set of managers can't make a go of it, a second, new set can't. The need's still met, though, usually by imports from another community, city, state, or country. And welcome to the way America's gone over the last 45 years.)