given the corp tax rate in 2011 was 35% id say hitting 600M in profit and somehow paying only 30M instead of 210M does not really count as "fair" nor regular.
As I said in my comment on the Netflix tax thread [1], not necessarily.
Highly simplified example: if you spend $100 million over five years on inputs, all while receiving no revenue, and then sell your gargantuan output product (say, a mega-robot) in the sixth year for $100 million, then you haven't yet made a profit -- even though your books show a $100 million profit in the sixth year. Paying no taxes in that year would be reasonable.
If anything, my understanding is that corporate tax law is unusually harsh about such long-term projects, limiting how many years you can carry forward losses.
The specifics of how they got to $0 taxes matter, and not all reasons are shady. Some are, of course, like deducting arbitrarily high IP licensing fees to your foreign sockpuppet subsidiary. In that case, sure, hit 'em with both barrels.
In my opinion, the philosophy of "specifics of how" has already been co-opted by tax dodgers. There is no way to have both enumerative, mathematical thinking and a sense of justice when it comes to taxes, because rich entities can always think of a tax dodge you didn't enumerate!
The reality is, no regular person is ever going to be on the wrong side of corporate taxes. You'll never be a huge corporation, you'll never be a huge corporate board, and since indexing, you'll never be a particularly aggrieved proxy shareholder.
Nobody really cares how "giant corporation pays the maximum tax it can bear" is arrived to, but that's what people want. It's different if it were small business owners or landlords. People also sometimes hate SBOs and landlords, but sometimes normal people are landlords and small business owners, so they can imagine being on the wrong side of justice there.
So like so many things technocratic thinking gets into, it's possible to be right and wrong at the same time. Right in the general case, in this imaginary case, where you just enumerate all the things, then you think hard about the things, and then you get the right answer. Wrong in the case that people in the real world actually inhabit, because you're both a likable person and you're not a giant corporation, so your philosophy is great to co-opt for what is basically a public-theft agenda.
HN is a legal forum, a tech forum, a history forum, a knitting forum, and any other kind of forum that inspires knowledgeable posts by subject matter experts on topics the community finds interesting.
I agree that lobbying is a problem, but it's still important to distinguish between "corruption of the tax code" vs "stuff that makes perfect sense and would probably exist even if no one ever tried to corrupt the tax code for personal benefit".
"Not paying taxes when you haven't made up past year's expenses" is the latter. It should not be cited as an example of the former.
Certainly none of us will "be" huge corporations, since corporations are not human beings. But many of us are part of huge corporations, both as shareholders and employees.
Well certainly, if a bunch of other employees of other corporations can live a just and equal life, and those employer-corporations pay more than 0% tax, you can imagine that you can be part of a corporation that merely pays more taxes?
didn't know that info actually, as it's different here in Europe. I also see they had 91% in 2014 which is also interesting. Anyways wasn't really attacking them at all and also think the reason behind the 0$ is quite relevant in the discussion, yet I do strongly oppose the idea the original commenter made that amazon had been doing its fair share and square. They are doing whats best for them under what the law permits, including lobbying btw which uncertainly bends the laws to their favour. And the real debate in my opinion is, should it be possible this way ?
Accounting is a little more complex than your math would suggest. I'm sure Amazon followed the law here. Blame the laws, not the company. You wouldn't voluntarily pay more taxes than you're required to either.
Why not both? If I move to a country that legally allows me to do something horrible, people will rightfully call me a bad person regardless of the legality of the action.
Sure, but not paying any taxes isn't obviously a horrible thing.
The government says, through its tax laws, that it wants amazon to not pay taxes (probably because they had a loss). The logic behind this is that because amazon provides jobs, the government doesn't want the company firing people and/or not hiring people because of an unrelated occurrence.
If you want what amazon is doing to be horrible you have to show that what they're doing is actually horrible.
Perhaps talk about how they're making use of the resources of the united states while not paying back for the maintenance of those resources. Like, delivery trucks damage roads and without delivery trucks amazon can't exist, and therefore they are externalizing their costs to the tax payer by not paying taxes.
Additionally, you'll need to explain why the jobs argument is not sufficient to excuse their lack of taxes.
And you might also need to talk about how amazon R&D also isn't a good excuse. For example, if amazon perfects drone delivery of goods then they won't damage the goods. So we should let amazon not pay taxes so that they can perfect drone delivery because it will be a good to the entire nation. You need an argument for why this sort of idea is wrong.
> The government says, through its tax laws, that it wants amazon to not pay taxes
This kind of statement that assumes big companies passively take their tax bill from the government is either exceptionally naïve or wilfully disingenuous. We're talking about a company whose executives sat down with representatives the Luxembourg government to negotiate a special sweetheart deal (subsequently ruled to be unlawful state aid) and then moved its European HQ to Luxembourg
So what are you suggesting; Amazon should voluntarily send a bonus check to the fed? That's just ridiculous. I'm also not convinced that following the current tax law is "something horrible".
What's most troubling is that these are the same companies who say things like "We need more educated workers" as if tax dollars don't help to do that. They also use it was a rationalization / justification for paying less and less taxes (i.e., "We're not getting any benefit from what we're already playing.) To the bottom we go...
The companies lobbied for the laws. The companies aggressively pursue every break they can get.
Amazon is in the middle of taking a fortune in tax breaks from NY. They killed a tax on large employers in Seattle. They fought against cross state sales tax until they were so big it only hurt their competitors. Bezos owns the Washington Post, and media overall is controlled mostly be a handful of oligarchs.
If you start a business. Should you be able to deduct eligible expenses? I don’t know any sane person that would suggest not. If you make $100 and spent $100, then you have no profit. But you’re suggesting that this is a tax “dodge.” So that means that you’d tax the $100 of revenue even though there wasn’t any actual gain. If you applied that to all businesses, you’d destroy economic activity.
How much extra did you pay on your taxes this year above the required amount? I would bet you paid exactly what was owed. Under your logic, you are dodging taxes.
never implied they did anything illegal. im pretty sure their numbers this year is 100% legal as well. Nor im implying they did anything wrong, they're doing whats best for them which you and I would have done. I just refute the notion its "fair" that the tax structure is quite harsh on private individuals (id go as far as claiming is dependant on private individuals) but creates the situation for corps that using clever accounting to pay a fraction of the supposed sum is considered graciously courteous.
Highly simplified example: if you spend $100 million over five years on inputs, all while receiving no revenue, and then sell your gargantuan output product (say, a mega-robot) in the sixth year for $100 million, then you haven't yet made a profit -- even though your books show a $100 million profit in the sixth year. Paying no taxes in that year would be reasonable.
If anything, my understanding is that corporate tax law is unusually harsh about such long-term projects, limiting how many years you can carry forward losses.
The specifics of how they got to $0 taxes matter, and not all reasons are shady. Some are, of course, like deducting arbitrarily high IP licensing fees to your foreign sockpuppet subsidiary. In that case, sure, hit 'em with both barrels.
But please, attack them for the right reason.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19097415