Amazon to pay $0 in income tax for the second year in a row. - Polidicks

I'm not sure money necessarily does corrupt. At least not to the degree that the old adage would have you believe. I think money just enables corruption and corruption, in turn, enables the accumulation of yet more money. I don't believe billionaires are all just greedy because the money makes them do it.

I feel like it's worth mentioning that this is just income tax; they still paid over 900 million in other taxes.

So? Have they made no profits this year?

Actually, large companies typically don't make profit because a huge portion of what they make gets (sometimes theoretically, usually actually) invested back into the company in the form of expansion.

eat the rich

Amazon, which doubled its profits That was a rhetorical question. The answer is yes. Yes, they made profits.

Very many Local and Nationwide news stations are owned by very wealthy groups that were not dealt with early on to preserve journalistic integrity. Many websites, radio stations, TV stations are now run by very wealthy groups who if not are preaching conservatism choose to at least spread neoliberal viewpoints and avoid progressive ones as much as they can. Due to this they effectively control how we perceive local and Nationwide events by withholding information or by controlling who gets to talk about real events pubicly. When the 2016 presidential election came around I saw many newscasters true colors shine because they were trying to present only certain types of information to help keep the perceptions they want their audience to have.

Actually, studies show that money does in fact change you -- having more money than you know what to do with means you become comfortable with living a lifestyle of plenty, never feeling material need, and you forget what it is like to not be rich and not have that security. Empathy with less-fortunate drops and an elitism mindset slowly creeps in. Your money pulls you into different directions and into places and social circles you've never been to before (and you stop going to other places you went to before), and this applies subtle pressures and cultural shifts. And I get the feeling that this has always been the case and is why successful (at least on the decades timespan) aristocracies encouraged their elites to adopt a charitable if patronizing attitude toward the commoner class, because without a positive encouragement the rich would simply lose sight of the needs of the common man and grind them into the dirt through neglect until a French Revolution comes around. https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/mbqknn/having-a-lot-of-money-affects-your-personality https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_money_changes_the_way_you_think_and_feel https://www.smh.com.au/money/planning-and-budgeting/how-money-changes-your-brain-behaviour-and-beliefs-20170428-gvv13t.html I would like to think that if I won a $100 million lottery tomorrow that I wouldn't change, except for maybe moving to try and keep people from tracking me down to beg/steal, but I think after five years I probably would have to put some effort into remembering that nearly everyone else in the thread/chat I'm in can't just afford to throw $10,000 into PC upgrades or some other hobby thing. I'd like to think that I'd never get so bad as to be a kill-the-poor taxes-are-theft greedy cunt extreme conservative, but I think it probably would gradually make me forget how tough things were before I didn't have to worry about any casual spending under $25,000.

Actually that's not true either; most major corporations will often times move money out of the country to tax free nations such as Switzerland and etc and then claim losses even though their sitting on cash. That's the original arguement they had for decreasing the buisness tax was because it'd convince and these companies were saying it'd convince them to re-patriot they're nations. The fact of the matter is that most of these buisnesses wouldn't survive actual taxes or actual paying of staff. Amazon makes massive losses on its storefront but brunts it with their tech solutions which bring in the majority of their money. If suddenly they'd have to start paying living wages or cover for their workers taking SNAP and Medicaid? Amazon alone would start losing big.

Well I mean imagine building a tower higher and higher without paying any attention to it's foundation and see what happens

What the actual fuck even is this argument that it's legal so we can't blame them and everything is just hunky dory The law isn't a monolithic entity, legislation doesn't just spring fully formed from holes in the ground. Laws are not written in a vacuum. Just because it's legal for these companies to be skipping out on taxation for this that or the other reason does not mean what they're doing is right and I genuinely struggle to understand how it's supposed to mean nobody can complain or that nobody can blame them Lobbying exists. Citizens United passed. It's genuinely questionable that massive companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, your pick of auto companies, your pick of oil companies, multiple billion dollar industries, are skimping out on any kind of taxation within the United States while taking so much from the nation at large and being offered even more big juicy tax breaks and corporate welfare deals despite already making out like bandits The GOP is a political entity that openly caters to to any kind of big money interests. They regularly hold majority government control. Their most cherished economic philosophy is supply-side economics. Trickle-down economics. The kind of economics focused specifically around giving large corporations these kinds of tax breaks Who gives a shit whether or not it's legal? It's a question of whether it's right

We live in a corporate dystopia. We are constantly surveilled and packaged as products to be sold to advertisers. The only measure of worth that is acknowledged is the ability to make money and any means that you can exploit in this pursuit are considered fair game despite the ethics. It's a depressing mix of people saying 'I'm alright Jack/fuck you, got mine' and living in fear of corporate power. And why wouldn't you hold corporations up in your mind like they're feudal lords when that's the level of freedom that they're given by our governments to work us to the bone while paying 0 tax to maintain upkeep of the society that they're a part of?

Fox News is now apparently outraged that (some) corporate income taxes are too low, ya nobody's gonna notice that flip flop there from the champions of the tax cut

even stronger reason to have high taxation on the wealthy

the fuck are you on, I just got a quote for some adhesives at 45k $$ for 10 gallons. corporations make a fuckton of profit on their businesses through tons of shady but legal tactics like application based pricing which is basically price gouging based on how important a component is to someone else or in amazon's case by being a gigantic conglomerate of digital services that our current antitrust doctrines ignore because its not creating measurable negative harm, but I can't imagine why they give away all these services with prime membership either.

Just for the record, I don't want to come across like I support Amazon doing this; I think they should absolutely be forced to cover these things, as should all businesses over a certain size. I was merely addressing the perception that they weren't paying tax at all or that they were somehow illegally dodging them.

Oh no, I entirely agree; they're using legal loopholes they bribed through. Its as simple as that.

We barely live paycheck to paycheck, and all of us have people who depend on us. We can't just up and leave our responsibility, especially not with how police are equipped now. You think anyone throwing bombs at the Amazon hq won't be filled with bullets? Or anyone else in the riot?

Sometimes, blood must be spilled to make change. That's the scary truth. It sucks, but when all options fail and the system fails to correct, you have to take it into your own hands. Because at that point, who's left to fix it? You.

Can someone explain to my dumb neanderthal brain how exactly they got away with paying nothing in income taxes? I'm not very good with this sort of thing.

If you're so eager for blood, please bey guest and go first.

I don't blame the government. The government is just a tool that's been engineered to benefit the richest few, and any accountability through voting is meddled with by corporations to the point where most people either think it's only fair that Amazon pay $0 tax and get paid $3 billion to setup a new HQ or think that there's no way we can/should do anything about it. I don't blame any individual company or person or government or politician for this. The system we operate under is beyond fucked up.

Dude. Read my fucking post: "Profit: Money that is earned in trade or business after paying the costs of producing and selling goods and services."

The problem is the broad influences that control the structures of society. I afraid with how things are structured, it going to take a catastrophic economic collapse to cause window breaking riots, terrorist bombings, and employee strikes. Fear the men who has nothing to lose, type of situation.

slave mindset

Christ, my bad, I codeswitched in my head; I meant taxable income. Stupid fuckup on my part, but my posts do still stand in what I was trying to get across, which is that these companies simplify aren't paying income tax because the companies aren't making taxable income since by filing time they've spent it on one thing or another. The money is gone, spent (usually on expansion), and if it's used as a check for a CEO then it's taxed then, unless it's being illegally shifted somewhere.

That's still a bullshit system, though. When I pay income tax I do so based on how much I earned, regardless of whether I reinvested that money on loan payments or just spent it all on soda and videogames. I don't see why companies should get special treatment in that regard.

I mean yeah, but what can I do about it? I can't just throw away my life, just to be arrested, or go unnoticed while protesting.

that's your choice to make, but I should remind you that mahatma gandhi threw away all the aspects of his privileged life to become the man he was known to be today. There is nothing to fear except for fear, such has always been the case. Everybody with devotion to a cause has thrown everything else away because to them their cause is everything. That's literally how all the well known movements of the world rose. Those people and leaders weren't afraid to suffer, or die, for something they believed in. Also I've put my money where my mouth is, by helping people who can't help themselves, participating in free health camps, as well as freely giving treatment or health advice to anybody who asks for it or comes to my doorstep to request it. I can do a multitude of things in my position that other people might not be able to, but that doesn't mean that if it comes to that, I wouldn't stand shoulder to shoulder with somebody espousing a bigger cause, where my poor individual self would do what it could to aid it. Granted, I can't expect everybody to be the same kind of wide-eyed idealist, but I should remind you that I'm as much a cynic as I am an idealist, simply because of how much pain I've been subjected to myself as an individual for no fault of my own, by others who either felt threatened or wanted a target for their own frustrations.

You actually can. A lot of things that you spend money are on are tax deductible, I.e. charity, breaks for being married, having kids, and a bunch of other stuff that the government either wants to reward, or make soften the blow of (gambling loss reductions). The system encourages the money to be spent on expansion (which is good for the economy) or on increasing worker benefits or other internal spending. Even if it's used just for the greedy purpose of huge CEO payouts, it's getting taxed as personal income tax for those CEOs at that point. It's a lot more complicated than them just allegedly not paying taxes at all, which is what the headline makes it out to be.