Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

barchart.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 183 posts

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#91

Post by rogerrogerr »

colechristensen wrote: post #84
monero-xmr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correct corporate tax rate is zero, or the correct income tax rate is zero. Double taxation on employees of corporations is ludicrous and warping. IMO corporate tax should be zero, and we tax individual people instead.

[flagged]

This isn’t how it works - for one, you’d be required to be paid a fair wage as an employee. Your employee “benefits” would be taxable income to you personally.

Then, your corporation would quickly be scrutinized on both its income (corporations don’t get W-2’s, you probably can’t just move your existing income to a corp) and its expenses (“reasonable and necessary” is very broadly interpreted, but is unlikely to support what you’re doing).

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#92

Post by gruez »

vel0city wrote: post #78
gruez wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is the point the parent poster is making. We say that it's ok for corporations to deduct everything, but not the people? Why are we ok with that? Because companies, to some approximation, are pass-through entities, so it doesn't make sense to tax them. Most of the stuff you buy are for own use/consumption. Food is an obvious one, but so are movie tickets TV and last year's European vacation. Companies don't do…

> Companies don't do any of that. It doesn't need food, movie tickets, or European vacations. And yet they sure seem to cater a lot of lunches and dinners, pick up the costs for large corporate events, pay for suites at event venues, and fly executives around the world in private jets.

>And yet they sure seem to cater a lot of lunches and dinners,

Those are taxed at 50% rate, specifically for this reason

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b#en_US_2025_publink1000...

>pick up the costs for large corporate events

define "costs"?

>pay for suites at event venues, and fly executives around the world in private jets.

If it's for legitimate corporate purposes, I don't see the issue, because as a contractor you can do the same deduction. And while I'm sure there's some non-zero amount of improper expensing going on, the amount relative to income taxes paid by the employee makes this a non-issue in practicality. The IRS has better things to worry about than grilling a company on whether some executive's 1 week stay at a $500/night hotel (tax value: $3500) was a proper expense or not, when the executive makes $500k+ TC.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#93

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #35
kristopolous wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you honestly say when the people were drafting how IRAs would work they were thinking this as an intended use-case?

Can you say why employees of large and well funded businesses get to save $23k+ per year in 401k, but employees of small and less well funded businesses can only save $7k per year in an IRA?

You don't have to be large and well funded. You do have to have your own SEP-IRA, rather than a regular IRA, and almost any self-employed person could do that. I am self-employed, my business is essentially a sole proprietorship, and I get the higher limits because of the type of IRA.

So the question is really: why do some people only get to save $7k a year in an IRA and others get to save much, much more?

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#94

Post by gruez »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #89
gruez wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"intended use-case" is just more fuzzy language. They probably thought everyone would buy mutual funds, rather than 3X leveraged Nvidia ETFs. Does that mean buying such ETFs (and making bank) mean you're not paying "your fair share"? Or for something more down to earth, what about meme stocks and bitcoin treasury companies, both of which are technically companies, but are definitely not what the authors of the bill h…

The purpose of IRAs is clear from the name - Individual Retirement Account. It was intended to allow individuals to save more effectively for their own retirement, and the justification for it centered around providing incentives for people who might not otherwise save enough. At least, that was the publicly delivered account. For a billionare who can already retire in comfort few will ever know to be using any kind…

>For a billionare who can already retire in comfort few will ever know to be using any kind of IRA for any purpose is outside of the publicly given justification for their existence.

So if you're sufficiently rich (by some arbitrary amount), you're now a "tax evader" and "not paying your fair share"? Can we say the same about other deductions, like the standard deduction? I doubt you'll be able to find a politician that answer "yes" to "do you think bill gates' first $14.6k in income should be tax-free?", does that mean that's "tax evasion" too?

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#95

Post by Sparkle-san »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #85
Sparkle-san wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this can make sense theoretically and what about cases where companies just horde wealth like Apple or spend it on stock buybacks (like Apple)? I'd want to see some sort of impetus for them to either reinvest or pass it along to their employees.

It seems strange to me that someone would want to punish a corporation for maintaining a larger reserve with which to handle economic downturns and the like, allowing them to continue to pay and employ those same employees instead of just letting them go. "Hording cash" sounds like NOT spending on expenses and offsetting profits, and therefore likely involves that corporation being taxed. In addition it sounds a lot…

Using that money to retain staff during a downturn instead of doing layoffs sounds great and would make sense as something to incentivize through the tax code. There's definitely a point where a company can have an unreasonable amount of cash on hand.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#96

Post by cpburns2009 »

jekwoooooe wrote: post #57

And Amazon pays 0%

If you're going to lie at least make it believable.

> Amazon annual income taxes for 2024 were $9.265B, a 30.13% increase from 2023. > > https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/total-pr...

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#97

Post by colechristensen »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #88
colechristensen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Those benefits are taxed ad income under existing rules. It's not even close to being that easy to abuse.

I've never had to report or been taxed on corporate benefits like free lunches, retreats, or any kind of company event. People very freely classify things as business expenses and not as benefits. Want a tax free corporate sponsored vacation? Make a 2 minute monetized youtube video about the beach you went to! Oh no, you only made 50¢ from youtube? I guess there's a $8,000 loss I can use to offset any tricky to avoid taxed income. Oh, and I need a top of the line MacBook and camera equipment to make those videos so the corp pays for those too.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#98

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

gruez wrote: post #94
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of IRAs is clear from the name - Individual Retirement Account. It was intended to allow individuals to save more effectively for their own retirement, and the justification for it centered around providing incentives for people who might not otherwise save enough. At least, that was the publicly delivered account. For a billionare who can already retire in comfort few will ever know to be using any kind…

>For a billionare who can already retire in comfort few will ever know to be using any kind of IRA for any purpose is outside of the publicly given justification for their existence. So if you're sufficiently rich (by some arbitrary amount), you're now a "tax evader" and "not paying your fair share"? Can we say the same about other deductions, like the standard deduction? I doubt you'll be able to find a politician t…

Not at all.

The standard deduction has an entirely different purpose which is not negated by extremely high income and/or wealth.

IRA's, however, were set up for a specific purpose for which Thiel is not the target.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#100

Post by peterbecich »

dh2022 wrote: post #68
peterbecich wrote: post #52

Why is a corporate tax necessary? It would be simpler to increase the income tax. EU has low corporate taxes and higher income taxes i.i.r.c.

By income taxes do you mean personal income tax? In any case, corporations benefit from airports / roads / ports / law enforcement / defense / education / etc... which are funded by local / federal governments. So corporations have a moral duty for to contribute to these expenses by paying taxes. (But it is only a moral duty, and not a legal obligation. So corporations end up paying nothing, or next to nothing.)

The rationale for a low or zero corporate tax is that corporate profits eventually become personal income of the shareholders and employees, and can be taxed there. Nobody builds a for-profit corporation for zero salary or personal profit.

Hypothetically with zero corporate tax, if the corporation paid zero salary, zero dividends, and shareholders never sold anything, the corporation could amass ridiculous amounts of untaxed wealth. But this never seems to happen.

I mean personal income taxes, plus capital gains taxes, taxes on the individual -- I am in favor of; not on the corporate entity.

Post reply on HN