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%. “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:
