I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.

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AnthonyMouse 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount.

This is in the right spirit but you want two things to be different about it.

The first is that the threshold for a given industry doesn't make sense as a dollar amount, it makes sense as a market share percentage. Having more than 15% market share should be a thing companies don't want, regardless of whether it's a $100 trillion industry or a $100 million one.

And the second is that taxes create a perverse incentive for the government. You absolutely do not want the government to have even more of a financial incentive to sustain and create more of the companies of that size. What you want is to have fewer of them.

So, what you want is a rule that if a company has more than 15% market share, the entire general public is allowed to sue them into bankruptcy for the offense of market consolidation. Which also removes the problem where they buy off the government prosecutors, because if they commit the offense then anybody can sue them.

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philipkglass 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This would permanently increase DRAM prices. Memory fabricators either earn billions of dollars in income each year or they can't keep going. There are no little Mom and Pop businesses that can do photolithography on leading process nodes.

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octoberfranklin 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Nonsense, it would force vertical de-integration.

Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; you don't have to own a printing press to be an author. Carver Mead even described his vision of the industry that way.

Nowadays you have to get your cell libraries and a large chunk of your toolchain from the fab. Of course it's laundered through cadence+synopsys, but it's still coming from the fab. You have to buy your masks from the fab (heck they aren't even allowed to leave the fab so do you really own them?). And on and on.

For the record I don't agree with the "exponential" part, but otherwise this is an underappreciated and powerful technique.

	▲	philipkglass 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In another comment you proposed a sane version of the parent proposal. I wouldn't have commented if fpoling had originally floated that scheme. I was mainly objecting to drastically increasing taxes "once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion" without regard for the minimum viable scale of different businesses.

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Terr_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is that revenue, or profit? If revenue, it'll slam certain kinds of high-volume low-profit businesses, and if it's profit then the company will just arrange to have big compensation "expenses" for executives.

The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on individual income.

	▲	octoberfranklin 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The sane version of this proposal omits the "exponential" part, applies to profits (net income), and makes the tax rate industry-specific (just like Washington State's revenue tax).
	▲	Hikikomori an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Set limits so the top cant earn more than x times the lowest paid in the company then.

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logancbrown 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah yes, the same tax mentality that is working great for EU innovation.

	▲	wqaatwt 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Corporate taxes specifically were quite high by European standards until 2027 and are not relatively that low today either