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Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

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 items like accelerated depreciation, just like millions of other companies. At the end of the day, people of a certain mindset just want to take other peoples’ money and the more of it they have they more desperately people believe they don’t deserve to have it.

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Can you prove that all the other businesses that didn't survive, either online or shops weren't has much jobs than the one Amazon provide?

Also, all the taxes that they don't pay needs to be paid by others. For each optimizations done by those companies, it's as much money that needs to be paid by others as each country runs on a budget that is mainly based on taxes. Them not paying taxes as a direct impact on taxes that needs to be paid by the one who pay taxes as well as the quality of service and infrastructure of a country. Infrastructure they uses a lot by the way, like roads to deliver their goods for example.

It’s hard to compare to other businesses because amazon cannot capitalize R&D. If they spend $1bn on software dev and Tesla spends the same amount on a factory, Amazon’s ebitda is down $1bn and Tesla’s is only down ~$100M.

https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2016/may/deductibility-...

Says software is capitalized over 3-5yrs. The difference is that software dev costs usually grow smoothly year over year but gigafactory launches are spiky

Taxes are no end in itself, they are necessary to provide the infrastructure (streets, legal system, ...) so that people and businesses can thrive.

Not wanting to contribute to that is the epitome of free-riding.

> 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.

Exactly. There is such a thing as fiduciary duty. As a board member, if I find out my CEO is overpaying on taxes because he feels like it's the "right thing to do", his ass is getting canned. Our competition is not going to do that, and you get no brownie points for being a naive simp. This is a competition, not a drum circle.

Why is it better to tax employee personal income than corporate income?

Companies can easily move, people mostly don't.

It was the other way around until XIX century. People had been moving around Europe or emigrating to America in search of lower taxation while moving physical business (like local brewery) was next to impossible.

Novel. I was expecting some variation of the supply side doctrine. Not penalizing people because holding corporations accountable is hard.

They reported $12 billion in profit last year. That's not low.

profit != revenue

Revenue was over $200 billion. What is your point?

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