Right, because tax money, once collected, simply vanishes into thin air and never, ever shows up as the income of private companies, nor drives entire sectors of the economy.
At least that's how it works under the purple skies of planet Libertaria.
It is simply their desire now to not pay taxes, not pay their workers well, to clone 3rd party vendor's products under their own brands, to copy the occasional SaaS hosted on AWS etc.
The article actually says they received $129 million instead of paying taxes on $11 billion profit!
https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-2018-aws-delivered-most-of-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-amazon-com-antitrust/e...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...
It's "simply their desire" not to pay taxes? You think the IRS accepts that? Do you think they just write in "sry guys, we'd rather not pay"?
No, they aren't paying taxes on this money because it's offsetting prior losses. This is a perfectly reasonable way to structure the tax code, and it only seems like malfeasance to you because you haven't bothered to understand it.
I am not an accountant, so I can't claim to fully understand what qualifies as a gain or loss, but my assumption has always been that the accounting rules are supposed to be sane and reflect the difference between these concepts (a real loss vs. going into debt).
If you see a problem with this picture, the problem IMO is an overly complicated tax code that mostly benefits people/businesses with the resources to navigate it.
That aside, if Amazon paying nothing in federal income tax largely has to do with offsetting previous losses, what's the problem? That seems fair, and I would really want someone who has a problem with this to explain why it would be more fair to tax a business' gains one year by ignoring previous years' losses.
From the second paragraph of the article:
> "The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy says the company is subject to a 21 percent tax rate on its U.S. income. However, through various tax breaks and credits, the company will receive a tax rebate of $129 million."
The difference is that companies with too much bloat die. There is no concept of that at all in the federal government because it just goes into more debt or taxes more instead.
The soldiers and the endless wars are the worst examples of what the government can do.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/03/eu-to-fine-amazon-millions-i...
It's a while since they didn't make a profit, in large part because of AWS growing to currently north of a million an hour net profit on margins their retail side can't replicate.
https://www.recode.net/2017/4/27/15451726/amazon-q1-2017-ear...
Suggests Q3 2015 was the last time they lost money... and lost can mean anything with enough accounting.
Depreciating capital assets though is an extremely important part of the tax code. If you don't allow that businesses won't really be able to operate effectively.
Honestly, did you not understand that basic accounting or did you just type quickly without thinking.
This is a really good example of why basic economics or even an intro to business accounting needs to be mandatory in high school. Otherwise we end up with people voting on economic policy based on complete ignorance and clickbait like this headline.
What are you trying to argue? Taxes are good, because some part of them is redistributed back to private companies?
I'm arguing the fact that spending by government is literally the engine of our own and all other economies, and that libertarians are hilariously delusional about this bedrock fact. Without this spending/circulation there is zero facility nor security for the conduct of commerce nor is there income for the vast majority of the private enterprise.
When you rebut, please use a privately-developed communications protocol stack to do so.
You can begin with a symbol -- the largest single private employer on the planet, the retailer named Walmart. A fully subsidized operation that, per its own filings, depends upon SNAP payments paid to its customers for its income. In addition to being dependent upon these payments the company depends on SNAP serving as payroll subsidy for its hundreds of thousands of workers who they choose to pay poverty wages.
Then for sectors, you may move to the depth and breadth of the energy, R&D, defense, security, health care, package freight and construction sectors, who, without their single largest governmental customers, would be a small fraction of what they are, employing a tiny fraction of historic levels.
Then there are sectors that are utterly dependent upon government subsidy, such as pharma research, agra, and transportation. Add to this the rest of the economy: sectors that would grind to a halt if not for indirect dependence upon public goods -- courts, roads and communications capacity funded by taxes.
Fact: taxpayers, uncompensated by any shares of stock, pay the bills and line the pockets of stockholders in most of really existing capitalism. Socialism exists and dominates for the rich while the market discipline that libertarians live to defend is in fact something that is reserved exclusively for the non-rich. Capitalist fables about the importance of incentives and market discipline fall on their faces the second you scrutinize flows of taxation as well as flows of appropriated value taken from workers under capitalism.
It's not moral people are forced to pay for these things.
I own a company. Thanks to my direct experience, I know very well where value comes from: labor alone.
Enjoy the purple sky (and the glib, wrong, one-liners) on your planet.
If that is actually true, you also know that: 1) You had to invest in the company, unlike the employees. 2) You carry far more risk than the employees. 3) Your employees get their money immediately and they are sure to get the money, while you have to wait for profit, and there might not be any.
But you know that, there's no point discussing labor theory of value in 2019, it has been debunked many times. We can discuss the flat earth theory next if this is the standard.
We all had to. We all are owners.
> ou carry far more risk than the employees.
False - an stems from the foundational presumption you made stemming from your ideological indoctrination.
>Your employees get their money immediately and they are sure to get the money, while you have to wait for profit, and there might not be any.
Also false. Not only have you reversed how payroll actually works in any enterprise, failure also stems from the presumption you made owing to your ideological indoctrination.
> there's no point discussing labor theory of value in 2019, it has been debunked many times.
Also false, also stemming from your ideological indoctrination.
See, presumptions and scoffing might work on your planet. They don't work on this one.
Let me know if you need anything else cleared up about how businesses are run.
How have I reversed how payroll works?
When one day you graduate to running a business, please run payroll in the way you describe. Your error will be very plain then.
You’re welcome!