Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnordwick | Hacker News Reader

> Amazon famous literally pays $0 in taxes), but not relative to how much they make.

because they took every penny and reinvested it and lost money for a long time because of such heavy investment.

just a few months ago everybody was complaining about companies not investing enough and returning money to shareholders - there was even legislation floated to force more investment.

companies cant win with people like you - invest and get assulted for tax reasons, don't invest and get yelled at for that.

you have this Utopian view of how you want everything to work, and don't even realize it isn't even possible most of the time.

View on HN

I'm not really interested in judging Amazon; they're a for profit company, they're going to do what's best for their bottom line. And I'm sure they don't care what I think. This is more about the systemic issues with the tax code itself.

It worked exactly as it is supposed to: it incentivized long tern investment where amazon lost a lot of money because they invested so much.

if you want to tax them on those losses that they rolled forward, you would basically have far less investment.

make up your mind - do you want them to invest and take losses or not invest and pay taxes - you can't do both.

The devil is in the details; a lot of the things they're getting tax breaks for don't benefit the public. Why are they getting tax breaks for building warehouses and data centers for themselves? Stock based compensation for executives?

Also, regardless of what breaks are available for what activities, their baseline tax burden ought to be much higher. We should be drawing funding from people who can afford it and use it to lift the burden on people who can't.

> Why are they getting tax breaks for building warehouses and data centers for themselves?

Are you fucking kidding me? They get capital construction break like every other company gets. If you don't see that as the literal definition of investment you don't deserve to have an opinion on this.

I don't think we should be giving them tax breaks for investments that are only for themselves. They're going to do that anyway because it expands their business. If they were doing something that had a genuine public benefit, that they otherwise wouldn't do, that would be a different story.

> because they took every penny and reinvested it and lost money for a long time because of such heavy investment.

No, my understanding from press reporting is that the heavy reinvestment was to avoid taxes in the first place

that's the same thing. we set up tax structures to encourage long term investment precisely because we hope companies will try to invest to avoid taxes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com