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September 05, 2005
Holiday weekend: 72 hours to study!
Well, not quite -- but I've been hitting the books, this Labor Day weekend, laboring over leases (ACC 455), partnerships (456), and taxes (375).
One issue that starts to come into focus, when you study accounting, is how taxes are structured -- and you start to wonder why they're set up the way they are. Several years ago, I wrote a column expressing my puzzlement that when I work as a technical writer in a W-2 capacity, I get taxed essentially on revenue, while if I do the same work as a 1099 consultant, I get taxed only on profit. I'm talking about doing exactly the same work here -- just doing it on someone else's payroll vs. doing it independently and getting a check from them as a contractor instead. (I'm well aware of the IRS's 20-questions test that they use to determine whether a contractor is really a contractor or an employee in disguise -- but I'm assuming that I pass the test to qualify as truly independent.) Why can't an employee deduct mileage to and from work, for instance? Does gas cost less because he's driving to a W-2 employer rather than a client?
Another issue -- one that liberals and conservatives are always fighting over -- is whether dividends should be taxed. The accounting community is unanimous that this constitutes "double taxation," since dividends come out of after-tax income, and that they therefore shouldn't be taxed. Capital gains are another one -- when I buy some shares of stock, I've already been taxed on that money, when I earned it. Why should I be taxed again, simply because I know where to put my money?
Less clear is whether or not corporations should be taxed. If you polled the students and faculty at the NAU business school, I'm sure they'd come out heavily against any corporate taxation, because after all, if you don't tax corporations, the money's not going away -- it's going to "flow through" to the corporation's owners and employees anyway, and they pay taxes. So although it may seem "obvious" that corporations should be taxed, maybe they shouldn't. On the other hand, you could argue that corporations should be taxed -- perhaps even taxed more than at present -- because that gives them an incentive to pay their employees more than would be the case with no corporate taxes.
These are the types of things an accounting student starts to spend a lot more time thinking about.
Posted by Urbie at September 5, 2005 04:23 PM