You have to come into the article believing a ton of things:
1. Tax credits are illegitimate
2. Accelerated depreciation is illegitimate
3. Ownership of productive companies is "hoarding wealth"
4. Journalism is in a battle with the current administration
5. Paying taxes is a good thing
If you _don't_ buy into these premises, for which there is no argument given for or against, you'll be tilted against the author. If you do, you'll be tilted against Tesla. This is polarizing. There is no nuance, there is no learning, there is no insight.
1. I should be able to deduct the same sorts of things from my individual income that corporations routinely deduct from their income.
If a corporation can legally shield all of their income from taxes, why can't I shield all of my income from taxes? Corporations can deduct the costs of all the things they have to do to make money and do weird depreciation tricks, but I cannot deduct the costs of all the things I must pay for in order to make my own income.
You do. The biggest of all tax giveaways is the home mortgage deduction and tax deduction on employer paid healthcare. The tax sheltered things like retirement accounts, HSAs, Roths, college savings plans, energy credits, home improvement credits, car breaks, annd do on, are also huge tax giveaways to citizens. Those are the biggest tax breaks in all US law, far larger than all of corporate breaks combined.
Then, as a citizen, you have tax cuts for kids, for school, for various small enterprises, for local this and that by jurisdiction, you do get depreciation on lots of goods. I could go on for the thousands and thousands of pages of personal income tax law.
Being ignorantly of a thing to arrive at outrage is still ignorance.
None of these things, or even the combination of all of these things, allows an individual to shield 100% of their income from taxes, the way corporations shield their income from taxes.
They absolutely do! Earned Income is a refundable tax credit - 47% of all Americans pay no net income tax, and some receive a refund in excess of any taxes paid.
* excluding payroll tax deductions, both personal and employer paid (which is effectively still a tax you're paying). They also pay sales tax, which isn't an income tax per se, but when you have to spend every dollar you make to survive, it might as well be.
If you have enough rolloverloss from one year to another, then you can pay 0%, same as a corporation. In fact, over 40% of people pay zero federal income tax, and a significant amount get lots of govt money, so they’re getting effectively a negative income tax.
The vast majority of corp pay income tax, unless (and this is nearly never many years in a row) they have such tax rollovers from prev year.
Now, they also still pay property taxes, enemployment taxes, half your SS, taxes on goods bought, and a host of other taxes, independent from income taxes.
All your outrage is simply ignorance of how taxes work, and so far you’re wrong about all your unfounded belief. Go read how taxes work, learn to read SEC filings. CBO has detailed solid reports prepared covering all this stuff.
When you think something about taxes is outrageous, it’s going to be because you don’t understand them, and you’ve filled your head with tripe from sources designed to mislead you. Read actual tax law and filings, and all this misunderstanding will go away.
I think it’s outrageous that the IRS doesn’t just compute taxes for us. And I think it’s ridiculous US citizens have to file regardless of where they are.
You mention mortgage interest deduction, EV tax credits, and energy credits. I'm pretty sure corps qualify for all of those, and with no SALT cap. Then they get to deduct food, rent, utilities, and car ownership/depreciation, which I can't. And their tax rate is flat. There's a reason people find loopholes to push personal expenses into businesses, not the other way around. I would most likely pay less tax if I were somehow a corporation, even if it meant losing my 401(k) and HSA.
Of course, you can't literally compare corps to people. Their profits are ultimately paid out to individuals and taxed again. People don't exactly have revenues. So I'm not saying the current way is wrong, but the statement you're responding to isn't ignorant.
This is one of the most galling things you realize when you start doing business taxes. If individuals were able to deduct expenses necessary to earn income like businesses do, that would include most meals, full cost of housing (not just mortgage interest), most utilities, vehicles [0], etc. And there would be no "standard deduction" to clear, either.
[0] official IRS policy is that "commuting" expenses are not deductible, but practically you declare the principal place of business as your home, and then anywhere else you go is no longer commuting.
It's more the administration is attacking journalism than the other way around.
For example, the FCC regularly receives complaints against pretty much every broadcaster that they are biased and the FCC regularly dismisses those because broadcasters are supposed to be allowed to take positions that politicians may disagree with.
Until now. The new FCC chairman reinstated complaints against all the major network stations that were alleged to have a liberal bias and is now subpoenaing them, and did not reinstate any complaints against major network stations (e.g., FOX) that allege conservative bias.
One of the policies is that if you are at all a journalist you are an enemy of the state.
During his rallies he'd literally have the entire crowd riled up against the very concept of journalists, because they might not suck up to him every single second of every single day.
Seriously, where do comments like this keep coming from?
Maybe it's better to say the current administration is battling journalism, in a one-sided way. There's a real difference, but it looks too much like splitting hairs.
I don't believe those things and still don't disagree with the author. Because the article is too devoid of real information for me to have an opinion on this.
1. tax credits are legitimate. But who is using it and on what matters. getting hundreds of millions of tax credit to make horribly constructed cybertrucks does not inspire confidence. But I did want more EV benefits (those are gone now. Alas. "Drill, baby, drill"
2. I don't really know enough about accelerated Depreciation to comment
3. Ownership of productive companies is good. Keyword: "productive". Tesla has been cutting staff, closing dealerships, and again with the cybertruck. "profitable" does not equate to "productive" in my eyes.
4. Yes, Journalism for the most part is in a battle with the current administration
5. Always the fun topic to talk about. As a concept, paying taxes is good. Any more deliberation into reality may as well be its own separate topic. I do personally think corporate needs to provide more taxes, but Trump clearly disagrees this year (corporate tax cut from 21% to 15%, I believe).
If they depreciated some assets faster, that only delays the taxes by a year or two. They'll still pay.
$300M in tax credits is basically the same as them paying $300M in tax and then getting a big check from the government for meeting some goal. I don't think it should be treated as any kind of avoidance on behalf of the company. Instead, check if the government paid that money for something useful, and if they didn't then blame the government.
Maybe they assume tax rates will be better for them in 2026. Under that assumption, deprecating things now to shift the tax burden to the future is kind of avoiding tax (or more accurately: the 2024 tax rates).
Given the level of corruption in the US government in general and the role of Musk in the current administration in particular that doesn't seem unlikely to me
> In what world is a massively profitable company paying almost nothing in taxes polarizing?
I mean they didn't just decide not to pay taxes. They followed the tax law. They accelerated some depreciation to take it now at the expense of a higher tax bill later. They took advantage of some government credits.
Corporate taxation is only one point of taxation. They pay payroll taxes, they pay sales tax on equipment they purchase at their factories, their employees pay taxes when they get paid.
Low corporate tax rates are unpopular because the optics are bad, but it doesn't actually mean that money is flowing through the company and into their employees without taxation anywhere. As soon as they do nearly anything with that money other than buy more parts to sell, taxes are being paid.
> they pay sales tax on equipment they purchase at their factories
Most states exempt equipment purchased by manufacturers from manufacturing their products from sales tax. I believe many also exempt raw materials that go into those products.
That Tax Foundation says [1] that both California and Texas (which I believe are the states where Tesla has factories) are states with such an exemption, although I'm seeing other sources that say that California's is just a partial exemption.
Something is wrong with the tax law if this is an accounting trick that only a few companies can use this effectively, which I suspect it is. I also suspect that the CEO of Tesla supposedly being placed in charge of federal agencies will somehow reduce that future tax bill. Corporate tax doesn't have to be a thing, but if it is, it needs to be applied fairly.
> Something is wrong with the tax law if this is an accounting trick that only a few companies can use effectively, which I suspect it is.
Yes only a few companies could use this, but the main factor here is not really a trick. Any other company that sells electric cars and has 0-3% profit could do the same thing.
If you get a small tax credit per sale, and your taxes are 21% of 3% of your sales revenue, and that makes your taxes smaller than the credit, then you don't have to pay taxes.
I was referring to the advanced depreciation, not the EV tax credits. Tesla's profit margin is more than 3%. Per the calculations someone else did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42893563 Tesla supposedly got $300M in tax credits, which is much less than 21% of their profit.
> I was referring to the advanced depreciation, not the EV tax credits.
The advanced depreciation only knocked out .5 billion from the 2.3 billion, and they'll have less depreciation in the next few years because of it. I'm not very worried about that being an exploit.
> Tesla's profit margin is more than 3%.
2.3 billion out of 97.7 billion revenue is less than 3 percent.
But another page is saying 2.3 billion is from the quarter, not the entire year? Then that changes the math some and you can counterbalance a bigger single digit profit with those credits. But if your actual worry is the depreciation then it's not worth analyzing this much further.
> Tesla supposedly got $300M in tax credits, which is much less than 21% of their profit.
It's not much less, it's a little bit off but we're using very rounded numbers to start with. When all the numbers are rounded to the nearest .1B, the napkin math being off by 78M just gets a shrug from me.
At least among economists it is not that polarizing. Most agree we should get rid of corporate tax. [0] In reality a corporation cannot pay taxes any more than a table can. Only people can pay taxes. So who pays the corporate tax? It must come from the corporation's consumers, employees, or shareholders (or some combination thereof). Raising the corporate tax is just a sneaky way of raising tax on one or more of those three groups.
> a corporation cannot pay taxes any more than a table can
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
Seriously, they're two entirely different classes of things. One is an inert physical object, the other is a legal instrument that can collect and retain money, and shelter its shareholders and employees from legal and financial outcomes.
If I asked the average person on the street, which of these two things do you think would be more likely to pay taxes, they would look at me like an idiot.
You could probably get most economists to agree people shouldn't pay income tax either; they are a distorting influence. Land/economic rent taxes really are the way to go.
Yes. Corporations are made of people, and they produce goods and services for other people. The people that compose that corporation pay the tax, or the people they sell to.
But companies are legal entities, they can buy, sell and own stuff. They aren't just a collection of people. They can make profit, some huge amounts, and they should pay taxes for that.
You don't understand that in the US's capitalism corporations are people. That's why they are able to use infinite money to influence elections (because in American CAPITALism, corporations' usage of money equals free speech and you can't limit people' speech). Yes, I agree, it's absolutely insane.
Google "Citizens United v. FEC" Supreme Court decision.
Conveniently, they are people only when it comes to corruption and influence. But not when it comes to rules or punishment (like if a corporation killed people, it should be possible to give it a death sentence).
"The court held 5–4 that the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations including for-profits, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other kinds of associations."
1. Tax credits are illegitimate
2. Accelerated depreciation is illegitimate
3. Ownership of productive companies is "hoarding wealth"
4. Journalism is in a battle with the current administration
5. Paying taxes is a good thing
If you _don't_ buy into these premises, for which there is no argument given for or against, you'll be tilted against the author. If you do, you'll be tilted against Tesla. This is polarizing. There is no nuance, there is no learning, there is no insight.