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Comment by measurablefunc | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen a cent go to any service in my local municipality from Meta's taxes & whatever does end up in the city coffers is not big enough to have any real effect b/c those services could just as easily be financed by direct payments instead of some circuitous route of federal, state, & sales taxes from transactions enabled by corporations like Meta.

If I was in SF & working for Google or Meta then maybe you might have a point but I'm not in SF or any major metropolitan area so from my perspective the whole thing is actually a net negative.

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Brief google search shows that most Meta DC's give around ~15M per year taxes on average per year. I'm not sure what circuitous route you are speaking about.

https://www.northernpublicradio.org/wnij-news/2024-12-02/dek...

https://ipmnewsroom.org/how-do-data-centers-benefit-the-plac...

Meta is an unnecessary middleman, all those payments could be handled w/o them & their advertising network. Also, from your own link

> META received a 55 percent tax break as part of the Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program, which is a state initiative

This doesn't make any sense.

You asked this

> How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centres?

And I gave the answer. How do you think you can eliminate the middleman?

> Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program

The amount I showed was after accounting for the Tax abatement program. And its almost as if there's a reason the state wants to have this program in the first place. Almost as if it helps broader society.

My city has bonds for all sorts of projects & it is financed by the people & federal grants. No corporations are involved in the process. It's not complicated: https://www.epa.gov/waterfinancecenter/effective-funding-fra...

You asked how data centres help you personally, I answered that it was taxes.

Your response is that - no you don't need the money, you can get it elsewhere.

This is a kind of senseless argument, I'll let you decide whether that's the case.

Those workers pay quite a lot of federal taxes

Meta takes more in than whatever it pays back¹

> Meta Platforms reported annual income taxes of $25.474 billion for 2025, driven by massive profit margins and a major one-time tax charge stemming from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Despite massive recorded U.S. income, Meta's effective federal tax cash rate dropped to just over 3.5% due to extensive research and development (R&D) credits, stock option tax breaks, and bonus depreciation.

https://share.google/aimode/INoZEto9gPbRPilrV

3.5% is criminal.

3.5% is fake.

Corporate taxes are calculated on net income, i.e. revenue minus expenses. Amounts paid to employees (e.g. to do R&D) are expenses. The tax code defines which years you can deduct the expenses. Sometimes it requires you to deduct them in a later year than you incurred them, even though that's asinine and encourages companies to do buybacks instead of investing in R&D.

In years when the tax code changes, it thereby causes there to be years when companies are deducting both this year's expenses and previous year expenses they couldn't deduct earlier, and other years when they deducted less than they actually spent. The total deductions are still equal to expenses, but then disingenuous critics point to a low "cash" rate in the year deductions were shifted into, ignoring that it only happened because they weren't allowed to deduct those expenses in a previous year when they were actually incurred.

Taxed generally don't use cash-based accounting and if they did then the companies would have been able to deduct those expenses sooner.

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