[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by Bownesian

I'm not sure why I'm bothering here, but companies looking at laying off significant numbers of employees aren't making profits and so aren't paying business taxes.

You make a lot of good points in your response but this part is a little misleading. Companies don't only lay people off because they aren't making profits so when they are doing it to reduce labour costs to keep their margins up they are obviously still paying taxes.

Your proposal would reward companies who can afford corporate taxes (those growing or maintaining their staff) while paradoxically in a relative sense punishing those who can't (the small cohort who are cutting staff but manage to maintain marginal profitability and so would be paying tax).

This was a factor I was considering when I wrote the post, I still think it could work to some extent within smaller businesses. Your point is a very valid one though, it is in the same line of reasoning for why I don't think across the board business tax cuts will help struggling businesses, like you said if they aren't making profits then they aren't paying taxes so it would only help businesses that have managed to stay out of the red.

Saving a job when it's not needed is a waste of life for the employee (the purgatory of going to work with nothing to do), is bad for the company (morale, waste and inefficiency that comes from being overstaffed), and is thus a waste of tax money.

I would suggest you go ask one of the 100k people currently unemployed which situation they consider a waste of life: going into work and getting paid even if it's slow but waiting for things to pick up, or sitting at home collecting ei? I will agree it would have negatives for the employer financially, but to make it appear that the employees would be worse off because of it really was surprising to read given how reasonable your other points had been. Morale would go down? How good is morale when people are going into work every day expecting a pink slip? I don't see how company showing its employees that it cares enough about them to do whatever it takes to keep them employed would ever have a negative effect on morale.