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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

So that $28 billion in tax revenue they talk about. How does that jive with all of the statements that Amazon paid $0 in tax through savvy use of the laws?

Ignorance? Wishful thinking? Marketing? I'm honestly not trying to be political, just wondering where they're getting that from.

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Amazon pays $0 corporate income tax. They pay huge amounts of other taxes.

Is there a citation for this that does not lead back to that probably-biased ITEP article?

Edit: clarification, since it seems my question as misinterpreted. Is there a citation for the $0 in federal income tax?

Their financial statements show they provisioned $1.2 B in income taxes worldwide for 2018, I suppose from that narrow perspective you have to define 'plenty'. Their effective tax rate seems like it's in the 10% range?

I think it'd be difficult to measure their employee tax footprint, I haven't been able to find good numbers on that, a Fermi estimate makes their numbers seem plausible if they went according to plan.

https://ir.aboutamazon.com/static-files/ce3b13a9-4bf1-4388-8...

Not the OP, but here's a Bloomberg article about this [1]. It has a bit of an incendiary tone. Later Bloomberg published an editorial [2] explaining that actually there's nothing scandalous about the zero federal tax rate; it is due to a difference between tax accounting and GAAP accounting. For tax purposes deferred equity compensation is considered to be out-the-door the moment it is granted, for GAAP purposes it's out-the-door the moment it vests.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-22/tax-law-d...

[2]https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-26/amazon...

This is my question as well.

you might be confused between Federal tax and State tax. Amazon paid $0 in Federal taxes but they still have to pay state tax in the states they do business in.

This is correct. The $27B also counts income taxes paid by employees, property taxes based on rising valuations, and so on.

>"How does that jive with all of the statements that Amazon paid $0 in tax through savvy use of the laws?"

You want "jibe" here not "jive." For some reason this malapropism seems to be on the rise, not sure why. Jive is never correct in the context of "in agreement" or "in accordance."

See:

https://grammarist.com/usage/gibe-jibe-jive/

That figure comes from the taxes paid by the people they employ

That tastes bad to me. That's not amazon paying tax, that's just employees. That makes the statement in that letter seem disingenuous. Am I overthinking this?

> That tastes bad to me. That's not amazon paying tax, that's just employees.

The entity that is charged the tax has nothing to do with who's actually paying the tax (in the real sense - the person who bears the burden of the tax). A sales tax that's added to a point-of-sales bill versus a sales tax that's invisible to the consumer and charged to the supplier has the exact same economic impact on both of them.

For example, FICA taxes are nominally paid 50% by the employer and 50% by the employee, but over 90% of the actual tax incidence falls on the employee. Even if we changed the law so that 100% of FICA taxes were paid for by the employer, employees' after-tax wages would be the same.

Just pointing out the number they're referring to

For the record I'm an LIC resident and generally opposed to Amazon under the proposed plan

No, you're not. This also conveniently ignores the additional costs to services.

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