I'm having a hard time with the realities of this. How much time should a corporation take to earn the salary of the average employee? What percent of a company's yearly profits would be appropriate to be spent on salaries? Many of the companies are exceeding 1/12. Is that enough? If not, what is?
I know I'll probably be on the wrong side of things (again), but I didn't find this graphic stirring. Is there a number out there that people find acceptable?
Even if we compare it to profits the time frame just switch to minutes. Walmart made a net profit after taxes of 14 billion. That translates to 26k per minute.
Payroll is an expense that gets deducted from revenue before calculating taxes.
They pay employer contributions/insurance/deductions but you pay the tax on it. It's to avoid double taxing that money (corp pays tax and you pay tax).
Edit for replies: yes, they pay payroll tax but that is based on payroll, and is a percentage of payroll. The other replies were referring to bottom line tax and revenue/profit. Maybe I should have been clearer but I was trying to keep it easy and not muddy the waters.
I have run payroll myself. When you run payroll, a company pays taxes to the government. Every paycheck. There are taxes the company is liable for and not employees.
I thing comparison to the employee salary makes no sense whatsoever. Different businesses have different expenditure structures depending on various things, like the type of business their are doing. In some companies, salaries might be dominating expense, in some others barely noticeable. Says nothing about how "fair" the business is.