Week Six public policy and inequality
The problem data caused to our society
This week after I finished the essay of Postdigital Society, find out what I said last week Postdigital Society, we should not only focus on data can bring human society’s development and progress, such as improve the production efficiency and quality of life of human beings, but also with the data in the human society brings many problems, such as the skills on the part of the people They can make use of data to seek more welfare for themselves. Therefore, in the competition for resources, those who have little access to data are always at a disadvantage in the competition, so data can aggravate the social inequality problem.
Increasing corporation tax widen income inequality
I started this week mostly looking at tax policy and income inequality.Study how taxes affect income inequality in a society. I have found that some companies in the face of high tax policy, in order to avoid reasonable tax, they will hire a senior tax officer to help them choose a plan. In some schemes, some companies choose to pay employees more to reduce the profit on the financial statement and reduce the corporate income tax, but this actually exacerbates the income inequality problem within the company. Corporate executives and tax planners have seen their salaries rise even more.So raising taxes may not necessarily reduce income inequality as much as it should. It can be seen that the formulation of tax policy is a very complex thing, we need to carefully consider many aspects of the details, in order to formulate a suitable tax policy.
What I need to do in the future
As for what is the appropriate tax policy, this issue needs to be further studied and understood by me. If you have any ideas, please come and communicate with me.
Haiqing, did you read Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology? It’s a huge book which could be intimidating, but he has this theory that the solution to making things more equal includes higher property taxes (and maybe also estate/inheritance tax). I know you’ve been focusing on corporate tax, but this might be worth looking at if you haven’t already (maybe start with the introduction and the final chapter, the rest of the book goes into lots of details about economic history in different countries).
Thank you Theresa, I would like to read this book. I find it is interesting to learn about the tax policy. I can see a big picture for the system of redistribution and learn more about what we can do for the income inequality.