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Comment by mykowebhn | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that income more than tripled compared to the previous year's quarter, but their effective tax rate dropped from 24 percent to 18.

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Why is that interesting? Corp tax rates are flat, not progressive and there was a significant change last year.

Progressive corporate taxes seem like a good idea to discourage companies from growing too big.

Why would we want that? Does anyone want to discourage companies from growing?

I don't get this.

Who thinks "I made $61 after tax profit on the last $100 of profits but I will only make $59 profit on the next $100 so I'm gonna chooAe to not make that $59 after tax money.

This is a genuine question. Is there any research or evidence that shows that increasing taxes on profits (which is what corporate taxes are) reduces pre tax profits in the US (I'm restricting to the US because it's possible other places have had more ridiculous njmbwrs, even leading to greater than 100% taxes). This isn't a rhetorical question.

The same applies to progressive income tax, but I know someone who actually did choose to forego additional income but it waS someone who didn't understand progressive taxes and thought the headline figure apuwd to their entire income instead of the marginal income.

I'm assuming reasonably sized companies aren't that stupid.

I tend to agree with you.

To play devil's advocate, assume you are Google or Apple. You have (quite literally) 100 Billion dollars in cash equivalent securities sitting around. You could do what amazon does and reinvest those into the business, but there is risk, and decreasing returns on that. Alternatively, you could just invest that money (in which case its not profit, so taxed differently, I believe), or you could pay your employees more.

Those second two are, in the long run, potentially worse for investors. Is that good or bad? Unclear. Is that even how the calculus works? Unclear. Is this line of reasoning obviously wrong? No.

It’s an interesting idea, imagine the smallest viable size for a computer manufacturer is $10 million, then after that start applying progressively higher taxes to discourage market domination and encourage competition.

I don’t think it would work but there is some appeal to it.

You would get a string of shell computer manufacturers making $10 million a year, because rational actors will exploit whatever rule you put in.

Market economy is like fuel combustion - it's only valuable to society if controlled. You want the combustion to happen to drive the things that matter (wealth and happiness of the society), but you don't want it to get out of control. You want a wealth-generating engine, not a raging gasoline fire.

Google feels more like a wealth-generating engine than a raging gasoline fire. Why would you want to dial that back?

I think the key words there were 'too big,' not 'growing.'

Why would someone want companies to grow to dominance where their size becomes leverage in itself? I'd rather have rich set of alternatives.

I think there is a point where a company accumulates too much power through its sheer size and further growth is not desirable. I would argue google and others have reached that point.

Then you make a bunch of loosely related subsidiaries that do the same thing (see the canadian wireless market) but are owned by the same large company.

Quarterly income tax rates are particularly not very interesting, they're prone to all sorts of blips.

Their 2018 income tax rate was 11% for the year. $4.1b in income taxes and $34.9b in pre-tax income.

In 2016 it was 19%. In 2015 it was 16.8%. In 2014 it was 21%.

Thanks to trump's tax cut.

You need to adjust for the $5B EU fine from last year.

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