If this makes you mad, definitely don't look into the taxes of just about every other company in the US. Particularly don't look at defense, integrated oil E&P, agriculture, or residential construction. I bet those industries would love for you to be outraged about Amazon and it's 21% off a $10B base instead their total subsidies that probably are high tens of billions or greater.
I feel better about the money staying in the hands of people that actually (and efficiently) provide useful services and products to people, unlike bureaucrats in the government who have no incentive to do things well and be efficient (and in reality have the opposite incentives).
Teachers, road workers, federal engineers, soldiers, and federal law enforcement aren't exactly bureaucrats. And while there may be a bloating of bureaucracy in government, the private sector has plenty of accountants and middle managers as well.
>And while there may be a bloating of bureaucracy in government, the private sector has plenty of accountants and middle managers as well.
The difference is that companies with too much bloat die. There is no concept of that at all in the federal government because it just goes into more debt or taxes more instead.
Depends on the infrastructure you are referring to. Things like roads are paid for with gas taxes and commercial trucking taxes that Amazon pays automatically in their shipping costs. They aren't exempt from that.
>I feel better about the money staying in the hands of people that actually (and efficiently) provide useful services and products to people, unlike bureaucrats in the government who have no incentive to do things well and be efficient (and in reality have the opposite incentives).
Right, because tax money, once collected, simply vanishes into thin air and never, ever shows up as the income of private companies, nor drives entire sectors of the economy.
At least that's how it works under the purple skies of planet Libertaria.
>Right, because tax money, once collected, simply vanishes into thin air and never, ever shows up as the income of private companies, nor drives entire sectors of the economy.
What are you trying to argue? Taxes are good, because some part of them is redistributed back to private companies?
>What are you trying to argue? Taxes are good, because some part of them is redistributed back to private companies?
I'm arguing the fact that spending by government is literally the engine of our own and all other economies, and that libertarians are hilariously delusional about this bedrock fact. Without this spending/circulation there is zero facility nor security for the conduct of commerce nor is there income for the vast majority of the private enterprise.
When you rebut, please use a privately-developed communications protocol stack to do so.
They shouldn't. They have deferred tax assets from years of losing money. This is perfectly reasonable. If you want to be mad about something, be mad about Google and Apple domiciling their IP in Ireland and siphoning all their profits there.
The article refers to $11 billion in net profit. They haven't known what to do with all their money ever since convincing the tech industry AWS was cheap, this month AWS will net around $700 million in profit.
It is simply their desire now to not pay taxes, not pay their workers well, to clone 3rd party vendor's products under their own brands, to copy the occasional SaaS hosted on AWS etc.
The article actually says they received $129 million instead of paying taxes on $11 billion profit!
>It is simply their desire now to not pay taxes, not pay their workers well, to clone 3rd party vendor's products under their own brands, to copy the occasional SaaS hosted on AWS etc.
It's "simply their desire" not to pay taxes? You think the IRS accepts that? Do you think they just write in "sry guys, we'd rather not pay"?
No, they aren't paying taxes on this money because it's offsetting prior losses. This is a perfectly reasonable way to structure the tax code, and it only seems like malfeasance to you because you haven't bothered to understand it.
I think they invest massively in accounting and legal and corrupt arrangements to avoid taxes, so it must simply be their desire. Their tax paperwork didn't accidentally end up $129m up instead of $3b down.
It's a while since they didn't make a profit, in large part because of AWS growing to currently north of a million an hour net profit on margins their retail side can't replicate.
Years of losing money on what? If I buy an expensive house, I can't write that off even if my net income is negative for years when you include that purchase. Why should they be able to write off e.g. an expensive office?
Is that how it works? Do they get to write off debts to assets of which they are still in possession, as if these are losses? Or are they writing off expenses for things they are not in possession of in any sense (e.g. employee salaries, goods sold)?
I am not an accountant, so I can't claim to fully understand what qualifies as a gain or loss, but my assumption has always been that the accounting rules are supposed to be sane and reflect the difference between these concepts (a real loss vs. going into debt).
They are probably depreciating the offices on a standard depreciation schedule. They are also writing off things like interest on their debt, etc..
Depreciating capital assets though is an extremely important part of the tax code. If you don't allow that businesses won't really be able to operate effectively.
Because they're a business. That's how business taxes work. You write off the expenses of operating your business, because low margin businesses wouldn't make sense otherwise.
What I usually don't understand is that when people bring something up like this, the intent feels like it's to make me mad at Amazon. Did Amazon break the law? No. At least not in this case, as far as I know.
If you see a problem with this picture, the problem IMO is an overly complicated tax code that mostly benefits people/businesses with the resources to navigate it.
That aside, if Amazon paying nothing in federal income tax largely has to do with offsetting previous losses, what's the problem? That seems fair, and I would really want someone who has a problem with this to explain why it would be more fair to tax a business' gains one year by ignoring previous years' losses.
Making a profit in a single year absolutely does not offset losses of the last years. If I record a loss of $10 every year for 10 years, I have lost $100 dollars. If I record a profit of $20 finally, I still have to make a profit of $80 before I even break even.
Honestly, did you not understand that basic accounting or did you just type quickly without thinking.
This is a really good example of why basic economics or even an intro to business accounting needs to be mandatory in high school. Otherwise we end up with people voting on economic policy based on complete ignorance and clickbait like this headline.
I don't understand what you mean by "all losses of the past are account in that." My understanding is they made a profit this year means the difference in the money they earned and the spent, starting January 1st 2018 and ending January 1st 2019, was greater than $0.
Tax credits and stock-based compensation are the likely reason. Some people will argue that with Amazon being one of the richest companies in the world there should exist no scenario in which they don't pay federal income tax and that the tax code should be simplified to close up these loopholes, but I just want a tax code rewrite so politicians and the media can stop exploiting the uneducated masses who don't understand what a tax break is.
> "Tax credits and stock-based compensation are the likely reason."
From the second paragraph of the article:
> "The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says the company is subject to a 21 percent tax rate on its U.S. income. However, through various tax breaks and credits, the company will receive a tax rebate of $129 million."