I hope that everyone is getting ready for International Equal Pay Day, coming up on the 18th. Americans fight (thank God!) inequality in individual earnings with the world’s most progressive tax system. Why not also fight inequality at the corporate level?
Nvidia’s recent quarterly report:
(The company is so forward-thinking that they’re already in 2027 while us peasants are stuck in 2026.)
Net income was almost $60 billion and an even-more-eye-popping 62% of revenue. For every dollar in sales, the company enjoys 62 cents in profit. The typical S&P 500 company earns about 15% in what the NYT tells us is an economy that has been destroyed by Donald Trump (the 10-year average is 11%).
(I want to pause here and take credit for my investment acumen. My standard line was that Nvidia’s profit margin couldn’t stay at 30%, despite the goodness of CUDA, because people who were big users of GPU would find better price/performance chips and recompile their software to run on those competitor GPUs. These latest quarterly results certainly prove my prediction correct because the profit margin did not stay at 30% (it moved to 62%). “Follow me for more investment advice.”)
Federal corporate income tax isn’t based on profitability, but is a flat 21% (Nvidia actually pays closer to 16.5% due to some money being earned in countries with lower tax rates, credits for research, etc.).
Bernie Sanders informs us that nobody needs to own more than 3 houses. The analogy for a corporation would be that no company needs to earn more than a 25% profit margin and, therefore, the corporate income tax rate should go up closer to 100% on the chunk of a company’s earnings that are more than 25%.
Speaking of Bernie and Nvidia, TIME’s 100 AI “innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence” does not include any current or former employees of Nvidia (sorry, Jensen Huang, Bill Dally, and the rest of the merry band identified in Even companies worth $1 trillion don’t want to pay Nvidia’s prices). Bernie Sanders, however, is featured as one of the top 100:
Perhaps this is because Senator Sanders was the first author of the 2017 paper that kicked off the modern LLM:
In the spirit of more equity, why not triple tax the earnings of greedy corporations? They are already taxed twice (both at the corporate level and the owner level), but wouldn’t it only be fair extend this equity further by adding a new “evil greed” triple tax on their sales to those who buy their evil products (on top of existing sales taxes, of course)? Capitalism is the root of all evil, so why not treat it that way explicitly.
This sounds like a Winning Idea…but what do I know? Your thoughts Phil (I’d ask Larry Summers, but he has “stepped back”)?
TT: Your idea is a great one. In addition to advancing equity, dultiple layers of taxation also help our leaders prevent the subjects from figuring out what is being paid.
Claudine: You know a lot about economics, I think, and I look forward to your forthcoming papers on the subject. When cutting and pasting from published works in economics, though, remember that “Listen to Black voices” doesn’t apply to this particular voice/web site: https://www.tsowell2.com/
Wonder how long Greenspun can hang on to a stonk heavy portfolio. For the 1st time in 20 years, interest rates are providing a competitive yield compared to stonks & all the S&P loving gootubers are now promoting MYGAs.
Bonds or a bond-like instrument (the multi-year guaranteed annuity? I had to Google “MYGA”) seems riskier right now than at any time since the Internet expanded into consumer territory. Suppose that AI enables bigger public companies to gain a larger share of GDP at the expense of small private companies? The small companies, perhaps, won’t have the resources to deploy AI, negotiate for favorable terms on cloud GPU rental, etc.
ChatGPT says that the S&P 500 has only about 40% of the revenue collected by all U.S. companies with employees. The S&P 500 could go up by 25%, therefore, if they simply expand to 50% of U.S. revenue. Note that they have been expanding their share. ChatGPT says “the consumer Internet appears to have increased the share of the economy captured by large/public companies”. Some of this is bringing in foreign revenue, of course, instead of taking market share away from small businesses domestically. I asked our AI overlord “Could Nvidia by itself be worth more than all small businesses in the U.S. put together?” and the answer is “Nvidia may now be worth about as much as the entire universe of very small U.S. businesses with fewer than five employees was worth a few years ago. … Once we broaden “small business,” however, Nvidia is nowhere close. The SBA currently counts about 36.2 million small businesses, generally using definitions that can extend up to 500 employees, and estimates that small businesses generate about 43.5% of U.S. GDP and employ 62.3 million people.”
Phil, thank you for this post! On my YouTube feed today, I saw that a Francesca Gino is suing Harvard for losing his/her/their/xir tenure. Have you heard about that? Any thoughts? I would think that it would discourage the granting of tenure to newer faculty, given that they could be sued for giving it!
It’s an interesting story. https://www.wgbh.org/news/education-news/2026-09-16/francesca-gino-lost-her-harvard-tenure-now-shes-taking-the-university-to-court
The former Harvard Business School professor built a reputation studying honesty and dishonesty, decision-making and ethics, workplace dynamics and productivity.
She became one of the most prominent researchers in her field, and, at one point, was the fifth highest-paid Harvard employee.
——————
Much of Harvard is based on fraud so I don’t know why this lady had to lose her lifetime paycheck because of fraud. Harvard told us that we were in a climate emergency… and then appointed Claudine Gay as president. There is almost nobody on the planet less qualified to deal with a climate emergency than Claudine Gay. Harvard tells us that low-skill immigrants make the U.S. rich and, therefore, we must have open borders, and then excludes anyone without a Harvard ID from its buildings.
Phil, so many thanks for your continued support! It means so much to me-really! So, I saw you referenced me in your response to the Wonderful samue and I was Overjoyed. I had some difficulty understanding your response, but I wanted to remind you and your Wonderful readers that it was actually me who signed off on the firing of Francesca Gino. I can assure you that not only do I have more Honesty in my pinky finger than she does in her entire Soul, gained through my Voluminous and Complex Research over Decades, but she was also a Floozy of the worst kind! Not Harvard material if you know of what I’m speaking (and Larry Summers can weigh in on this when he “steps back” in if that that would be helpful to you). I hope that helps clarify things a bit?
@CG
Didn’t I see you camped out in line at the Cambridge Target? Buying Pokemon 30th anniversary cards with all the other lifeforms having too much time on their hands? (I can’t believe Phil didn’t mention this important cultural news today.) Nice job keeping Harvard ranked below Columbia (and Berzerkely!) on the best college lists, seems like that would entail hard work. Your legacy precedes you. Best, girlfriend. ☮
Time cited this as representative of contributions to A.I. made by Sanders:
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/10.6.2025-The-Big-Tech-Oligarchs-War-Against-Workers.pdf
So, Phil’s attempt at academic misinformation by citing Sanders as lead author on “The Attention Paper” notwithstanding, Bernie was recognized by Time for his application of “Communism As a Solution to Everything (CASE)” to the looming A.I. Armageddon.
Meh — who cares? — when I get laid off from training my A.I. replacement, I’ll have more time for listening to high brow music:
https://youtu.be/VRvcarmU_Ho?list=RDVRvcarmU_Ho&t=73
> when I get laid off from training my A.I. replacement, I’ll have more time for listening to high brow music
Like when I got laid off my IT job after training my Indian offshore replacement in the ’90s, I met my wife in the mosh pit at a thrash punk concert.
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
— “To a mouse”, Robert Burns (oddly prescient of A.I.)
@Philip, You got it all wrong. Bernie Sanders isn’t simply talking about taking from the rich and giving to the poor. We already do that through our many welfare and redistribution programs, and you already know this.
What Sanders is advocating for is a much broader approach to economic equality. His approach seeks to achieve greater equality by bringing the rich down rather than bringing the poor up. Thus, he wants to dumb down the achievers to make everyone more equal.