Imagine telling a business owner that there is no such thing as gross revenue. The price you charge your customers doesn’t matter, because what matters is net profit.
This is an effort at political persuasion, just as the concept of “tax gap” is a deliberately manufactured effort of political persuasion by the government. It’s a great phrase to focus your attention on something, isn’t it? Ask yourself what you’re focusing on, and whose interests are served by directing your focus.
In a sense, this article is correct. The only thing that matters is whether I have a dollar in my pocket to spend on anything I want.
From a different perspective, I am converting an irreplaceable hour of my brief existence into money so I can eat and sleep in a warm, dry place. This author is telling me to ignore the gauntlet of pickpockets (government included) that make my quest harder.
Hell, no. I will keep my eyes wide open. Just as I, as a business owner, keep my eyes wide open on my financial statements, from gross revenue and pricing to net after-tax profit.
Yes, after-tax profit is the only thing I can use to go buy a hamburger. But I don’t ignore everything else upstream from that.
The Ghost of Bernays is hard at work with this article.
Pretty sure this is going to be a hugely antithetical / heretical article for some, I think it does kind of match the European view.
That said, there are a variety of things you can buy with your pretax salary and some other things you can do which reduce/change the taxes you pay, so it still does make sense in some instances to talk of gross salary.
This is an effort at political persuasion, just as the concept of “tax gap” is a deliberately manufactured effort of political persuasion by the government. It’s a great phrase to focus your attention on something, isn’t it? Ask yourself what you’re focusing on, and whose interests are served by directing your focus.
In a sense, this article is correct. The only thing that matters is whether I have a dollar in my pocket to spend on anything I want.
From a different perspective, I am converting an irreplaceable hour of my brief existence into money so I can eat and sleep in a warm, dry place. This author is telling me to ignore the gauntlet of pickpockets (government included) that make my quest harder.
Hell, no. I will keep my eyes wide open. Just as I, as a business owner, keep my eyes wide open on my financial statements, from gross revenue and pricing to net after-tax profit.
Yes, after-tax profit is the only thing I can use to go buy a hamburger. But I don’t ignore everything else upstream from that.
The Ghost of Bernays is hard at work with this article.