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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. But please, attack them for the right reason. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19097415 |
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.