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Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

nytimes.com

51–60 of 175 posts

Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

#51
post #3

Really have to start taxing over revenues. It's long due.

If it costs you 95 cents to make 1 dollar, an 8% revenue tax would means you would pay 1.03 in cost to make 1.00.

In my country, my company has to pay 21% VAT. For a dollar in sales we have to add 21% in taxes. But we deduct the VAT paid, so if we had to buy stuff for 95 cents, we'd get back the VAT paid on that, resulting in having to pay taxes only on the difference, being 5 cents x 21%, approx 1 cent. Hence it being called "value added tax".

I think this is a better tax than income taxes because it taxes consumption, not labor (although if you do work to add value this does get taxed).

Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

#52
post #41
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not making money is not the same as making losses. You can carry forwards losses you've made on investments.

> Not making money is not the same as making losses. I have rent and bills to pay regardless of whether I'm making money, that is the definition of making a loss.

Rent and bills are (in general) not deductible expenses.

Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look at Amazon's 8k and 10k filings; If memory serves it wasn't until 2015 or 2016 they turned a profit after almost 2 decades. It's been illegal, under racketeering laws, to sell at a loss in order to capture a market for a long, long time, and that's the real story here. Republicans and Democrats have let that one go; blaming political parties is a straw-man argument. They expect to utter the words and hope you…

If Amazon was selling at a loss until 2016 (almost twenty years since their IPO) where was the rest of the money coming from?

AWS

Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

#54

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. 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.” https://www.cnbc.c…

>>These are the actual things we should be talking about.

I (hesitantly) disagree. That specific tax policy change is a tree in a vast forest. It happens to be relevant here, but without it... It's not like Amazon, Google, apple, etc would have paid anywhere near the simple tax rate had that legislation not been enacted. Amazon had a different loophole/strategy in 2016 and will have another one for whenever the 2017 one expires whatnot.

Ultimately, corporate income tax has been broken for over 50 years, and it's been brought ken internationally, not just in the US.

...broken in the sense that the "rate" can be 35%, 23% or whatever and the total tax raised in an economy some number unrelated to that.

Reporting the way you suggest implies that in 2016 things were different, or that canceling that policy will yield a meaningfully different result. That's not the case.

Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

#55
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those all sound like corporate tax policies. That's literally what they're talking about. Clearly, a growing portion of the electorate doesn't like those policies. That's the first step in democracy, no? Engagement?

I agree that engagement and discussing policies is important. But it does feel disingenuous and aimed at provoking outrage (to trigger a knee-jerk reaction) when you just mention a fact like "look at these rich guys that don't share anything!" and ignore the context of why it got to be the way it is. And I'm not saying that there aren't changes that could and should be made. Just that this particular article doesn't…

I thought this (among other paragraphs) provided context:

"Though both parties have sought to lower the top corporate tax rate in the last decade — President Barack Obama proposed lowering it from 35 percent to 28 percent — Republicans in 2017 pushed it down to 21 percent, in addition to expanding some generous tax breaks. The new law allowed immediate expensing of capital expenditures, for example, in order to goose investment. That was one of the primary reasons that more corporations paid no federal taxes, according to the report.

Mr. Trump and his Republican allies argued that the tax changes would stimulate investment and economic growth. That has happened, though not by as much as they predicted."

There's no debate here, the article was written by one person. It juxtaposes several facts (changes in tax law over the last 10 years, a group of profitable corporations with an effective corporate tax rate of 0 (or negative), poll results, factory closings, and a number of statements by presidential contenders) and, for context, adds a handful of statements from voters and minor activists to give the reader a sense of of how voters in Ohio are viewing these changes.

It's full of charts and dates and numbers. While the title is a little provocative, I find the body text to be informative and interesting, and feel the temperature is kept relatively low given the extremely contentious subject matter.

Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

#56
post #37
post #23

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 item…

> take advantage of perfectly legal tax code items Nobody is saying otherwise. They are saying these legal loopholes are the problem that need changing.

Plenty of people are saying otherwise, either directly "These cross-national inter-company agreements are illegal and should be reversed" or indirectly "These companies are free-riding by improperly exploiting loopholes and should pay more."

If the only issue were loopholes, the fixes are outside of Amazon/Google/other companies hands and in the hands of the legislatures of the various companies.

Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

#57

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. 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.” https://www.cnbc.c…

I wish there were individual income tax credits for R&D work.

Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

#58
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not making money is not the same as making losses. I have rent and bills to pay regardless of whether I'm making money, that is the definition of making a loss.

Rent and bills are (in general) not deductible expenses.

but the rent and bills of a corporation are deductable? Why is it different?

A corporation has the same legal rights as a person, but a person has to pay more for these rights. It's unfair imho.

Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

#59
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that the consumers are the ones paying this too. Sales tax is almost always passed onto the consumer in the form of raised prices.

One could argue that consumers are the ones paying every tax.

Strawman. Not all companies pay the same amount of taxes.

Also customers not are supposed to indirectly pay corporate taxes in the same way.

Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax

#60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent and bills are (in general) not deductible expenses.

but the rent and bills of a corporation are deductable? Why is it different? A corporation has the same legal rights as a person, but a person has to pay more for these rights. It's unfair imho.

Ordinary and necessary business expenses (expenses incurred with a reasonable overall expectation of profit) are, in general, deductible in the US because we tax income.

Personal expenses are not.

People end up paying all taxes anyway, just sometimes one or two steps removed from the legal entity/TIN who files the returns.

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