211–220 of 369 posts
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>Every tax dollar you don't pay is a dollar someone else has to pay instead, or a dollar that gets added to the national debt. And burning your house down and writing off the depreciated value is absolutely not legal. nobody is entitled tax revenue. Laws generally support taxes on income/profit, and arent just a bill. It isn't illegal to work less and pay less taxes. It is absolutely legal to knock down your house so…
> It is absolutely legal to knock down your house so you dont have to pay property or mortgage tax on it. Yes, that's true. But that's not the same thing as claiming the resulting loss as a deduction on your income tax.
which you can also do. If you knock down your house, then sell it, you will have a pretty heafty capital loss, which you can then use as a income deduction for up to 8 years, or until it runs out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The line is at claiming a loss for tax purposes. Destroy the film if you like, but then you get no tax break. There's a similarity with the "hobby loss rule". In order to be a valid business who can deduct business expenses like losses, you have to demonstrate that you have a "profit intent". That means that you make at least an attempt to turn a profit on your work. If you don't, it's considered a hobby and you don'…
Warner Brothers has not only intent, but a demonstrated profit margin, which they are deducting the movie from. Why shouldn't they be able to deduct there very real losses.
Ultimately we write tax policy for the benefit of society, not for Warner Bros. In theory, we could write tax law so that it made financial sense for a factory to produce widgets and send them directly into an incinerator, because they could claim this as a "loss" and offset profits from other activities. But we shouldn't have a tax law that does that, because that's a huge waste of society's resources (materials for the widgets, fuel for the incinerator, people's time and labor). We could use those resources to do something more productive and tax laws should encourage companies to do productive things that improve the world, not spin their wheels for imaginary losses.
If you deliberately burn down your house and try to collect insurance on it, we call that insurance fraud. If you deliberately destroy your product and try to claim a tax loss on it, that should be fraud too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is absolutely legal to knock down your house so you dont have to pay property or mortgage tax on it. Yes, that's true. But that's not the same thing as claiming the resulting loss as a deduction on your income tax.
>but that's not the same thing as claiming the resulting loss as a deduction on your income tax which you can also do. If you knock down your house, then sell it, you will have a pretty heafty capital loss, which you can then use as a income deduction for up to 8 years, or until it runs out.
Yes, but you have to sell it, at which point it's a capital loss. And you can sell the movie and take a loss that way as well (assuming you actually sell it at a loss).
What you cannot do is delete the movie and then claim it as a capital loss -- because you haven't sold it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Warner Brothers has not only intent, but a demonstrated profit margin, which they are deducting the movie from. Why shouldn't they be able to deduct there very real losses.
They're not real losses. They could sell the movie. They could release it. They're deliberately forgoing those options and deleting it. You don't have a loss until you attempt to generate revenue and find that the revenue is less than your expenses. If you just throw your product away, that's not a loss. Ultimately we write tax policy for the benefit of society, not for Warner Bros. In theory, we could write tax law…
That is exactly how it works. You already spent X on an asset. If you throw the asset away, then you just have deductible expenses.
Same for the widget factory. You can deduct the material and factory expense of making of making defective widgets. If you trash them, you write down the value of your assets.
>But we shouldn't have a tax law that does that, because that's a huge waste of society's resources (materials for the widgets, fuel for the incinerator, people's time and labor).
This is the crux of things. Those arent society's resources, and never were. They are resources of the warner Bros and the widget factory.
Tax law isnt and shouldn't be about forcing people to do what you want. If someone wants to waste their time and resources, that is their choice.
It seems like this whole thread is people angry that they dont own the property of others, and get to control them.
Could we not just skip the 30 years of copy right protection or whatever it is now and just release it to the public domain? No money will be made, but if people should want to they can view it. I am sure Internet Archive or some organization would be willing to host such movies, and not make any attempt at making a profit from it. Even better would be to turn all the assets that went into the creating it into the pu…
You're off by almost an order of magnitude there. It's 95 years of copyright protection nonsense, not a mere 30. Edit: very few would complain if it were only 30
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but that's not the same thing as claiming the resulting loss as a deduction on your income tax which you can also do. If you knock down your house, then sell it, you will have a pretty heafty capital loss, which you can then use as a income deduction for up to 8 years, or until it runs out.
> then sell it Yes, but you have to sell it, at which point it's a capital loss. And you can sell the movie and take a loss that way as well (assuming you actually sell it at a loss). What you cannot do is delete the movie and then claim it as a capital loss -- because you haven't sold it.