People Are Corporations Too

At least in the '60s, the protesters were YOUNG and stupid. Not sure what these folks' excuse is.

In the ’60s, the protesters were at least young and clueless. Not sure what these folks’ excuse is.

 

You might not remember this, or have ever paid attention in the first place, and we try not to get too political on here anyway, but 4 years ago a lobbying group named Citizens United was the plaintiff in a big Supreme Court case. The group wanted to televise a film that was critical of a prominent Democrat (Hillary Clinton, if it matters.) The Federal Elections Commission said no, you can’t do that because it violates a 2002 law that forbids organizations such as corporations and unions from espousing such political speech within 2 months of a general election. (The passage of that 2002 law, by the way, is why some political commercials now end with the phrase “I’m Candidate X and I approved this message.”)

Citizens United said the 2002 law is malarkey, we’re still Americans here and free speech is free speech. Just because some people choose to organize themselves into a unit, they don’t vacate their right to support a political position or a candidate. People such as the imbeciles in the picture above can’t understand such a nuanced argument, so they resorted to the simplest slogans that could fit on a placard. Equating “corporations” with “people” was a popular mantra of the time, one intended to shock. How dare the Earth-poisoners at Monsanto or modern-day slavemasters at Walmart think they have any claim to flesh-and-blood personhood! (Why, they can get in line behind the unborn babies.) The folks making the comparison had never bothered to look at the etymology of the word “corporation”, or even understand the most basic principles of a corporation.

“Corporation” has the same root as the words “corpse”, “corporeal”, etc. It’s a body. A corporation is an artificial person, and not in the sense of a robot or a cyborg. It’s an entity in the eyes of the law, an entity created to facilitate business.

If corporations didn’t exist, every business would be run by a sole proprietor or a partnership. Those people could then be liable for debts beyond their personal ones. Put $20,000 of your own money into a business, incur a $150,000 loss when your supplier splits town and your customers cancel their orders, then spend the rest of your life with a negative net worth. Hey, you’d be just like those pathetic debt bloggers!

That’s why any ambitious business sets up as an entity that permits limited liability, as opposed to general liability. “Limited” means that as the owner, you’re only liable for what you put into the company. In the previous example, your losses max out at $20,000. It’s also why as an owner of a large corporation, which of course is what you are when you buy shares in Nokia or Alcatel-Lucent, you can’t lose more than your initial investment. No matter how badly the company performs. Procter & Gamble management isn’t going to call you and say, “Hey, Jennifer? Thanks a lot for the $6500 from your last stock purchase, that really helped out a lot. But we’re stretched this quarter, and I mean stretched. Turns out our new ‘tearless’ shampoo is blinding customers left and right. What I’m saying is, what you’ve forked over so far just isn’t going to cut it. Daddy needs another 5 large, and not tomorrow.”

If it’s good enough for multinationals, it should be good enough for you. Unless it’s run by a complete idiot, even the most modest auto repair shop or coffee bar will pay the licensing fee to the relevant state authority and register as a limited liability company or corporation. It’s a small up-front cost that saves you gigantically on taxes down the road. A business registered as anything less complex than a corporation pays both personal income tax and corporate tax, the worst of both worlds. With a limited liability company, you pay only corporate tax, which is typically going to be less than personal income tax.

Our tax code is famously arcane and nonsensical in places, but this is one twist they got right. If there was no added incentive for creating a business, no one would ever do so and the economy would remain static. You need to encourage people to take risks. That doesn’t mean covering their losses, as corporations go bankrupt all the time. It just means making it attractive for people to go into business. That way, if everything works out, they can a) sell goods and services that make customers happy and b) hire people to make/sell/lease/provide those goods and services.

The best part is that even just one person can incorporate. To keep this in language that’s legally and technically sound, you can create a corporation that’s coextensive with just you. You and the corporation are still separate entities as far as getting sued, representing one entity or the other in court, paying taxes, etc., but for practical purposes you’re one and the same. With all the benefits illustrated above. You still need to have a legitimate business behind this – financial accounting, audio post-production, furniture repair, gutter cleaning, tree surgery, whatever – but once you create a limited liability company you’ll be miles ahead of the suckers who can’t understand why life is so hard and why Uncle Sam takes an ever-increasing bite that renders forward movement impossible.

Embrace corporatehood. Start here. Chapter X.

Ordinary Income. Extraordinary taxes.

 

Manna wasn’t legal tender, but that doesn’t mean the IRS wouldn’t have tallied it.

 

A couple of days ago we pointed out how money doesn’t care where it came from. Some people think that their regular salaries should go towards daily expenses, while windfalls (inheritances, stock appreciation, house appreciation, etc.) can go towards less vital stuff like vacations and ATVs.

That’s an idiotic perception. If you have an asset to buy, defining “asset” as we do here at CYC (something that’ll build wealth), buy it. With your paycheck, or with a handout from Grandma. Or even a loan from Grandma, depending on what interest she charges. Otherwise, it shouldn’t matter. Regardless of its origins, money goes where it goes.

Well, that’s not entirely true. The only entity that cares how you came by your money is the Internal Revenue Service. Receive money one way, it’s taxed at a certain rate. Receive it another way, it’s taxed at a higher rate. Seeing as the IRS has the power of deadly force*, soon for the crime of not doing your duty for the Motherland and buying health insurance, it makes sense for us peons to accede to the agency’s capricious demands.

As far as the IRS is concerned, there are 2 ways you can receive income:

  1. ordinary income and short-term capital gains
  2. long-term capital gains.

This is simplified, obviously. A full accounting of every exception would take us years to write about.

Ordinary income? That’s:

  • Wages, salaries, tips, commissions, bonuses
  • Interest, dividends, and net income from a business that you own a piece of
  • Gambling winnings
  • Royalties
  • Rents
  • Pensions, assuming you’re one of the few people who collects one.

Meanwhile, capital gains are:

  • Money from the sale of a “capital asset”, like shares of a publicly traded company, or a house that you sold. Unless you’re a land developer and the house is your stock in trade, that kind of thing. The difference between short- and long-term capital gains is arbitrary but defined: hold on to an asset for a year before selling, that’s long-term.

We’ll spare you the numbers, but regardless of what tax bracket you’re in, long-term capital gains are always taxed at a lower rate than short-term capital gains and ordinary income are. There’s a good reason for this, too. Ordinary income (and to a lesser extent, short-term capital gains) carries little risk. If you punch a clock, you’re legally entitled to wages and can sue if you don’t receive them. If you wait tables, society expects that customers will tip you as part of (if not the bulk of) your income.

Long-term capital gains involve tons of risk. There’s no guarantee that that stock you bought years ago might ever result in a payoff. Contrast that with the biweekly checks you get after entering into a standard work agreement. By taxing long-term capital gains at a lower rate than ordinary income (and short-term capital gains), the IRS encourages people to hold onto their investments. If all income was taxed at the same rate, there’d be no incentive for anyone to defer spending (synonyms for which are “save”, “invest”, and “build wealth”.) We’d only chop trees down, never planting any.

So is this just an accounting curiosity, something for you to pass the time reading about on a boring Wednesday? Heck and no. Control Your Cash don’t play that game. If it didn’t apply to your life, we wouldn’t be spending time on it.

The more of your income you can derive via long-term capital gains, the less you’ll have to fork over to the IRS. We devote an entire chapter of the book to this. Chapter IX, the longest and most detailed one. (By far. Although it’s still easy to read, certainly no more difficult than our posts.)

Unless you want to move to Antigua – and before you do, remember that it’s easy to go stir-crazy on a 109-square mile island – you’re going to have to play the IRS’s arbitrary game. Both Wonderland croquet and Calvinball have more consistent rules. This wasn’t always the way, but America’s descent from beacon of freedom to patchwork of statism is a topic for another day.

Maximizing your long-term capital gains is the inevitable result of buying assets and selling liabilities, our 2-pronged guaranteed way to wealth. It means purchasing vehicles for passive, non-sweat income, no matter how modest or expensive: a $25 mutual fund contribution here, a real estate investment trust there. Anything that creates an income stream for you, or that should appreciate (such as a house). Hold onto it for at least a year, and you’ll pay less in taxes that you would if you’d earned similar income via more direct means. Hold onto it indefinitely, and…

You can defer capital gains, too. Sometimes indefinitely. Methods for doing this include structured sales, charitable trusts and 1031 exchanges, which we touch on in the book and will expand upon in future posts. Really we will.

The point is, don’t go to H&R Block with your W-2s and say, “Fix this for me.” And really don’t get a refund anticipation loan. You’ve got a few months to make this work for 2012, and to figure out how to not get burned in future years. Do it now. (By “do” we mean “buy”, and by “it” we mean click the link above. Which is also this link.)

 

*This is not an exaggeration. To quote P.J. O’Rourke, “If you don’t pay your taxes, you get fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you get thrown in prison. If you try to escape from prison, they shoot you.”