351–360 of 991 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a progressive, it seems like the Democrats always have Senate spoilers...
But this is the type of thing that progressives would like support (tax big corporate America).
This is insane, how does it make sense? Employee salary expenses are no different from other expenses to run your business. Imagine they did this for raw material instead, a restaurant could only expense 20% of the food that they sell. If they purchased $100 worth of food, but could only sell $50 worth of it, they have to pay tax on that even when making a net loss overall. It just does not make any sense. There woul…
It makes sense when you consider that there is no minimum tax rate on businesses. Given the choice, Amazon would rather spend 100% of its profits on itself than allow any of its profits to be paid out in taxes. Section 174 was implemented without a minimum tax on corporate profits before voluntary deductions such as research. Therefore, it’s exploitable and all companies ought to hire and fire staff to ensure their p…
Query any search engine for "are US income taxes direct or indirect taxes"
Every one will tell you that they are direct taxes. This is false. The supreme court has exclusively held that income taxes have always been indirect taxes (excises specifically, read about what an excise is in any authoritative source on tax law) in a constitutional sense. (See Brushaber v Union Pacific RR Co. 1916, Moore v U.S. 2024)
The sixteenth amendment did not give congress the power to directly tax citizens (or domestic corporations) and the complexity of the tax code is an attempt to obfuscate this fact, but the code is not inscrutable, it has rules.
Unsure of why this matters? Look up the difference between direct and indirect taxes in US law. None of these deductions matter unless you are a foreign corporation. I have tried commenting about this in other income tax related threads (this is my alt account), but people here don't like the idea that there is government propaganda in the US, or that most people are wrong and blindly accept the socialization about taxation without verifying what the law says.
I realize this is a disturbing truth to accept, not least because it involves accepting that most people who have been prosecuted for income tax crimes are only guilty of ignorance of the true legal purpose of the forms they signed. You can easily verify that most accountants and tax attorneys do not know what they are talking about by asking them this simple question about direct vs indirect taxation.
This is not legal advice, it is a wakeup call.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The unrealized values are a fiction. Then instead of taxing the gains, you'd accept the government nationalizing the assets by eminent domain and paying fair compensation that was significantly less than the "fictional" unrealized value? Or if someone unlawfully deprived you of the asset, you'd accept as restitution or seek as civil damages for the loss something significantly less than the "fictional" value? Or, w…
It would be much better to tax the benefits of the unrealized gain that a person realizes. It’s much easier to do because there is no disputing the assessment since the person implicitly agrees to the valuation. And it allows people to forgo realizing any benefit from the unrealized value at all to avoid taxation. Say take x% of the top of the money lent to someone who uses their unrealized gain to secure a loan. Mak…
This is insane, how does it make sense? Employee salary expenses are no different from other expenses to run your business. Imagine they did this for raw material instead, a restaurant could only expense 20% of the food that they sell. If they purchased $100 worth of food, but could only sell $50 worth of it, they have to pay tax on that even when making a net loss overall. It just does not make any sense. There woul…
Imagine you are BigCarCo, you make cars. The salary for your factory workers that build cars to be sold is an expense, incurred in that year, to be matched against the revenues earned by selling those cars. But the cost to build the factory needs to be amortized over the lifetime of the factory - and that's true whether you buy a factory from BigFactoryCo or hire a bunch of people to build it.
Now, I'd argue that a) most software dev work is closer to the factory worker than the factory builder and b) the lifetime for most software is less than 5 years, but the idea that some cost of developing software should be amortizable is pretty reasonable.
There are some misunderstandings in the comments that seem to stem from not having read the section, so I thought it was worth referencing the actual text [0]. It's quite short and easy to read. The most important bits: * Subsection (a) requires amortizing "Specified research or experimental expenditures" over 5 years (paragraph (2)) instead of deducting them (paragraph (1)) * Paragraph (c)(3) is a Special Rule that…
What i like about US is that compare to other countries (like for example Russia where i'm originally from) there is almost no lying and cheating here. Instead there is a respect of the law and an army of talented creative accountants and lawyers. Remember that stale "multi-used" sandwich served with the drink which by virtue of its existence converted drinking establishment into a food serving restaurant? Not being…
I thought you were being sarcastic here at first because, good lord, there is plenty of corruption here in the US (though those doing it used to care more about hiding it). The US, especially in its current state, is certainly not a place I'd describe with "almost no lying or cheating". I do understand that Russia is on another level, though, given the open assassinations and doing things like what was done to Navalny.
This is insane, how does it make sense? Employee salary expenses are no different from other expenses to run your business. Imagine they did this for raw material instead, a restaurant could only expense 20% of the food that they sell. If they purchased $100 worth of food, but could only sell $50 worth of it, they have to pay tax on that even when making a net loss overall. It just does not make any sense. There woul…
Labor that operates the business day-to-day would be an expense, labor that creates a capital asset is more complicated.
I happen to think most employee time in software dev is more on the day-to-day operation side, and should be expensed, but I can see an argument that some should (or could) be amortized.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Salaries in general (not just of software developers) are tax deductible in many countries. This is desirable because we do not want companies to be paying taxes on revenue.
I dunno, I pay taxes on revenue.
It's clearly not enough to cover all of the expenses that are required to generate your "revenue", but it's a gesture in that direction.