
Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11B in profit for 2018 - Elof
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-taxes-zero-180337770.html
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cle
Every time I see a headline about outrage over corporations not paying taxes,
my first thought is, "How much taxes did employees pay?" It's not clear to me
why a non-human should be paying taxes, when all of the humans working at that
company pay a ton of taxes (especially the tech side of Amazon, where
employees pay taxes on their high salaries and on their RSUs).

I'm definitely not an expert in corporate finance or taxes, so I would be
grateful if somebody could explain to me why I should be outraged by this.

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fizx
Economics 101 says that governments can discourage activities through taxing
them.

Most people would argue that society should rather give people more income
than corporations larger profits.

Therefore, corporations should be taxed more, and income taxed less.

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esoterica
Corporate profits get redistributed to individuals through dividends and
buybacks, so taxing corporations is just taxing the income of individuals
indirectly.

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chii
Those individuals who gain income from investments ought to be wealthier, and
therefore, more able to handle the higher taxation. Income deriving from wages
are currently taxed at a rate that's higher than income from investments, and
most people would agree that this is an injustice.

Of course, those who make and pass laws are heavily connected with those who
make their income via investments, and therefore, change is unlikely to
happen.

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conanbatt
Economics is not accounting: who signs the check is not who pays for it. The
concept is called "economic incidence" and its why corp taxes have consensus
to be reduced in the economist community.

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mtmail
related 300 comments 3 days ago in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19155655](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19155655)

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ikeboy
Title is false - they paid over a billion in taxes, they didn't pay federal
taxes though.

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thoughtstheseus
The U.S. needs a VAT.

