Comment by jkulubya

It should be a choice between spending pre tax dollars or spending post tax dollars. I doubt many would argue in favor of “burning” money just for the sake of not paying some fraction tax on it.

Imagine that you must access $100 of labour/whatever somehow.

  $20000 - sales
  ($10000) - cost of sales
  ——————
  $10000 - gross profit
  ($100) - extra labour paid for with pre tax money
  ——————
  $9900 net
  ($4950) tax
  ——————
  $4950 ending sum (pay dividends or do whatever you feel like with this)

vs

  $20000 - sales
  $10000 - cost of sales
  —————
  $10000 - gross profit
  ($5000) - tax
  —————
  $5000 - after tax profit
  ($100) - extra labour, post tax money
  ————
  $4900 - ending sum

It’s a bit unrealistic because (1) labour should always be pre tax (2) there are rules about what goes where in an income statement and you can’t just decide to put stuff where you want but there is some flexibility.

In particular, the one easily controllable lever is how much interest you pay on debt (pre tax spending)