The article is reluctant to mention the reason why they got those tax rebates, and focuses on the way people feel about it. This seems like bad journalism.<p>According to CNBC, “Amazon's low tax bill mainly stemmed from the Republican tax cuts of 2017, carryforward losses from years when the company was not profitable, tax credits for massive investments in R&D and stock-based employee compensation.”
<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/04/03/why-amazon-paid-no-federal-income-tax.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/04/03/why-amazon-paid-no-feder...</a><p>These are the actual things we should be talking about.
The intellectual dishonesty of this from allegedly smart people continues to astound me. Amazon has little-to-no taxes mainly because they have such low taxable income in the first place because they spend so much in R&D and other things. They’re actually creating jobs and new businesses rather than showing massive profits and paying a ton in taxes. I have no doubt they take advantage of perfectly legal tax code items like accelerated depreciation, just like millions of other companies. At the end of the day, people of a certain mindset just want to take other peoples’ money and the more of it they have they more desperately people believe they don’t deserve to have it.
> carryforward losses from years when the company was not profitable<p>The idea of carrying forward losses <i>in general</i> is sound, but I'm beginning to wonder if there should be an exception. If the loss is intentional, using investment instead of profit to drive growth, I'm not so sure those losses deserve to be carried forward. Probably an unpopular opinion here on HN, but I think denying reductions in those cases would be beneficial not only in terms of tax revenue from the larger companies but also in terms of reducing the VC-fueled ""unicorn or bust" mentality among the smaller ones.
Taxing <i>profits</i> (as opposed to revenue, value add, capital gains..) is the ultimate quixotic temptation for politicians.<p>On paper, it is a fantastic tax. Google, Apple, FB, Amazon... all the new economy winners are very <i>profit</i>able, 20% - 30% margins & fast growth are <i>expected</i> (and priced into market caps).<p>They're so profitable that money is just piling up, atm. They can't usefully invest it all. This means you can tax their profits without affecting the real economy. There's nothing google is doing that it couldn't do if they had to pay $10bn (25%-30%) as a tax on profits.<p>OTOH, unprofitable companies (eg Tesla), would have trouble paying extra taxes. It'd need to come out of investments in production capacity, R&D, etc. They wouldn't have to pay.<p>Corporate income tax is just a sensible idea, on the face of it. Unprofitable? Don't pay. Profitable? Pay. Minimum economic disruption.<p>But in practice... across many times and places... it's proved very hard to make a corporate tax scheme work.<p>Tax policy complexity. Accounting complexity. Multiple jurisdictions. The looping cascade of company ownership, partial ownership, contractual relationships, making up the legal "structure" of a google or amazon.<p>It all adds up to a reality wherein politicans cannot make a law that says 25% tax.. and have that mean something similar to what it sounds like.<p>This is a pill very few politicans or voters can swallow. Of course we can! We're legislators. We make laws. We have police, and tax authorities. Google finance said google made $40.42bn. The rate is 25%. Gives us $10.1bn.<p>Empirically, they generally can't. Changing things to enable corporate tax would require <i>massive</i>, difficult legal/bureaucratic reforms. You would need to consider insanely difficult changes, like heavy handed restrictions on a company's ability to own other companies, and the types of legal entities that can own legal entities. You'd need new accounting standards. The bureaucratic guts of the economic machine.
Surprised to see a headline from the NYT that uses weasel words ("some voters"? well some voters are also uneducated, so what?), which even Wikipedia has rules against. That being said, why does it matter if Amazon is not paying taxes itself if it is creating many jobs, with a good percentage of them being high paying, and who end up paying income taxes anyway? Not to mention taxes that Amazon pays for those employees to begin with.
> One of the benefits of taxation is taking it and using it for the collective good<p>Which is true no matter if the tax rate is 1% or 75%<p>> He could be taxed at 99.9 percent and still have millions left over<p>I realize this is hyperbole but do realize that no 99.9% tax would be complied with<p>> tax on every dollar over $100 million in profits they earn anywhere in the world<p>oh the American hubris, so lost in the goal of catering to their constituents that they think this institution has a valid claim on assets, and income. Lets take a cut of everyone's productivity IN A MORE FAIR WAY <i>crowd cheers</i>.<p>But alas, the US rule of law makes it secure for you to do business and these corporations benefit from this society and use its services - but thats also true whether the tax is 1% of 75%, so it isn't really an argument<p>> article shows graphs about tax rebates<p>Article doesn't talk about how the corporations used tax rebates at all. It talks about the outcome of paying no tax, talks about all these proposals, and none of the proposals talk about tax rebates. Even the most ambitious proposal here would probably not effect how these corporations operate. Are people - I dare say - stupid? Is this a mass reading comprehension issue?<p>It is interesting that people who can simply read can play tax games like this for another 100 years before anyone catches on.
Amazon paid no <i>income</i> tax. Amazon paid a shitton in taxes, and will continue to do so.<p>It is probably the case that profitable companies pay too little in tax, but articles like this are misleading as hell.
subchapter S (and other pass through) corporations pay no corporate income tax at all. this is the majority of small businesses.<p>Corporations ultimately distribute their profits to actual people. Those people will pay tax on that income.<p>It isnt automatically obvious that corporations should pay any taxes on income (or revenue) until it is distributed to actual people (shareholders and employees). We tax the profit of larger corporations because we can and because we need the tax dollars, not because there is some moral imperative to do it.
It doesn’t matter if corporations pay taxes because the money just flows to people who own equity in or work for those corporations, and they pay taxes.
This comes up all the time. The issue is not the companies. The issue is the loopholes that their highly paid tax accountants are taking advantage of. Change the law not attack the company for acting in the best interest of its shareholders.
>the list of those paying zero roughly doubled last year as a result of provisions in President Trump’s 2017 tax bill<p>The gripes seem to largely a political issue which I guess is down to the voters as to who they vote in.
> Colin Robertson wonders why he pays federal taxes on the $18,000 a year he makes cleaning carpets, while the tech giant Amazon got a tax rebate.<p>Who cares about what Colin Robertson thinks?