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Amazon paid just £15m in tax on European revenues of £19.5bn

theguardian.com

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Re: Amazon paid just £15m in tax on European revenues of £19.5bn

#71

Post by conradk »

pas wrote: post #68
developer2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that Walmart has "notoriously bad margins" makes it sound like they're working at a disadvantage. Walmart's margins aren't low out of necessity. Their entire business is purposely built around low margins, and refusing to hire full time employees with benefits, etc. It's intentional on their part - there is no sob story about margins there. Same goes for Amazon et al. The business strategy is to crush every sm…

> The business strategy is to crush every small retailer by operating at slim to no margins, purely to make it impossible for anyone else to compete. Large retailers compete against each other. Small retailers can't do much anyhow. (Especially in heavily car based areas, if you have to go just a few more minutes and you can find more and cheaper products, why would you stop at a small shop?)

You are being subjective here. Maybe you like driving for more and cheaper products, but not everyone is like you: not everyone drives, not everyones wants to drive, some people prefer supporting small shops than big ones, etc, etc.

Re: Amazon paid just £15m in tax on European revenues of £19.5bn

#72

Post by cestith »

falcolas wrote: post #22
cestith wrote: post #14

The TL;DR of this article is the author dislikes the taxing basis put in place by the legislature and is blaming Amazon for paying taxes legally based on that. Never mind the 65,000 employees in Europe who presumably do pay income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and more based on the fact that they have their income from their employer. If someone wants to argue for a 1% or 2% revenue tax rather than a much highe…

Ooh, HN Comment Bingo! "Don't blame the company for exploiting the loopholes in the laws!" This is a very old argument that gets rather tiresome to see on every article dealing with how much/little corporations pay in taxes. I'd rather see some interesting discussion around whether they should be paying more (or less).

Way to cherry-pick the sentence that shared a line with the discussion you wanted to have.

Re: Amazon paid just £15m in tax on European revenues of £19.5bn

#73

Post by rukittenme »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #63
rukittenme wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but they're not spending $100 to "dodge taxes". They're spending the money on positive NPV projects. You're mistaking an effect for a cause. Companies invest and expand and they pay less taxes as an effect. But in the future, they'll have to pay taxes on those revenue generating facilities they invested in. And if those investments go belly up then the company will LOSE more money than it ever gained by "dodging…

I don't see why Amazon is the only company privileged to grow. The only reason they are capable of operating right now (as in - on their low margins) is the sheer size they had reached by this time - and they are going nowhere but towards becoming the sole monopoly in the sector. That is - all of the power and a relatively low amount of taxes; given to their investors. Here's another bummer: why are citizens forced t…

> Here's another bummer: why are citizens forced to pay for the social security that is provided by the government to Amazon? For example police, roads and the airports that are the key parts of the infrastructure that are making Amazon work?

There is so much wrong with this statement. Amazon pays usage fees for everything you suggest.

Roads? Amazon pays a tax on gasoline which pays for the roads. As do all citizens and businesses. The tax is a usage tax in that Amazon pays more if it uses more than you and I (which it does).

Police? Amazon pays property taxes which funds local governments.

Airports? Federal and local authorities levy usage taxes for air traffic control, security, and other airport functions. Next time you book a budget flight, look at the line item break down. I've had flights where the taxes were greater than the fare itself (CLT -> ORL).

Amazon (and all businesses) bear the burden of collecting sales taxes. It doesn't magically go to the government. Amazon has to construct systems to collect, manage, and send sales taxes to their respective local governments. The government receives these taxes with no effort on their part.

Bottom line... Citizens and companies pay usage taxes to maintain infrastructure.

> I don't see why Amazon is the only company privileged to grow. The only reason they are capable of operating right now (as in - on their low margins) is the sheer size they had reached by this time - and they are going nowhere but towards becoming the sole monopoly in the sector.

They're not, many companies could and many companies do invest heavily in themselves. You're on HN, you should notice these strategies being used by every startup.

Side note: Amazon is not a monopoly power. They have many competitors across a lot of market segments.

Re: Amazon paid just £15m in tax on European revenues of £19.5bn

#74

Post by cestith »

falcolas wrote: post #22
cestith wrote: post #14

The TL;DR of this article is the author dislikes the taxing basis put in place by the legislature and is blaming Amazon for paying taxes legally based on that. Never mind the 65,000 employees in Europe who presumably do pay income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and more based on the fact that they have their income from their employer. If someone wants to argue for a 1% or 2% revenue tax rather than a much highe…

Ooh, HN Comment Bingo! "Don't blame the company for exploiting the loopholes in the laws!" This is a very old argument that gets rather tiresome to see on every article dealing with how much/little corporations pay in taxes. I'd rather see some interesting discussion around whether they should be paying more (or less).

You have fabricated a quote.

Do no misrepresent my post.

Re: Amazon paid just £15m in tax on European revenues of £19.5bn

#75

Post by pas »

conradk wrote: post #71
pas wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The business strategy is to crush every small retailer by operating at slim to no margins, purely to make it impossible for anyone else to compete. Large retailers compete against each other. Small retailers can't do much anyhow. (Especially in heavily car based areas, if you have to go just a few more minutes and you can find more and cheaper products, why would you stop at a small shop?)

You are being subjective here. Maybe you like driving for more and cheaper products, but not everyone is like you: not everyone drives, not everyones wants to drive, some people prefer supporting small shops than big ones, etc, etc.

I don't like to drive, I like small shops, and luckily where I live we have a healthy dose of small groceries. (But they are part of large chains.)

Re: Amazon paid just £15m in tax on European revenues of £19.5bn

#77

Post by ivcha »

d_theorist wrote: post #40

Corporations are not taxed on revenue, so I can only assume that the headline is designed to be inflammatory.

Why would you make such an assumption? Did the headline suggest that the (relatively small) tax was based on revenue? No, it did not. Please stop making such hasty, strong, and destructive comments. As we all already know, we have issues with weak (and disinformative) headlines; at least we can strive to have better comments and discussions.

Re: Amazon paid just £15m in tax on European revenues of £19.5bn

#78

Post by lucozade »

ivcha wrote: post #77
d_theorist wrote: post #40

Corporations are not taxed on revenue, so I can only assume that the headline is designed to be inflammatory.

Why would you make such an assumption? Did the headline suggest that the (relatively small) tax was based on revenue? No, it did not. Please stop making such hasty, strong, and destructive comments. As we all already know, we have issues with weak (and disinformative) headlines; at least we can strive to have better comments and discussions.

> Why would you make such an assumption?

Because it would be wholly disingenuous to presume the opposite. The article in general and the headline in particular is juxtaposing tax against revenue explicitly in order to elicit the response that there's something fishy. The article even goes so far as to have a quote about tax avoidance whilst carefully avoiding accusing Amazon of tax avoidance.

It would have been a much more informative article if they had said, say, that Amazon expect to make a small loss on 20bn revenue and then go on to explain Amazon's business model. This would, of course, have shed a different light on their share scheme as it's clearly very beneficial for their workforce.

But no, it's a large American corporation that doesn't pay much UK tax so let's bang out a low quality article that insinuates heavily but says not a lot.

Full disclosure: I'm British, have no relationship to Amazon (other than as a customer) and am no relation to Mr Bezos though we do rock similar hairstyles.

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