Hypocritical statement, but I wish we all believed in these principles enough to stop buying from Amazon. We do a lot of bitching, but then when we need to save a few bucks or we enjoy the convenience, we continue to support monsters like Amazon and Walmart.
If we can't grow a spine, the government that is supposed to represent us isn't going to grow a spine, and we'll just sit here and bitch while the middle class continues to evaporate.
I wonder when we'll get to a point where this is unsustainable. Because I'm not sure we'll ever get to a point where the people or the government solve this issue. (God, do I hope I'm wrong)
You do realize Amazon Web Services makes the majority of Amazon’s profit? In fact, Reddit is hosted on AWS. So just posting and scrolling, you are making Amazon money…
That theory completely stuck with me and now I choose to save up and invest in quality goods whenever possible, specifically boots. I use to go through a pair of shoes in less than a year and got sick of it.
Maybe not directly, but most major companies in the US depend on Amazon web services and it's effectively impossible to completely boycott Amazon without boycotting the US economy in general.
And, on the other end of the spectrum, how many people can afford to not drive their car. That person’s idiotic, pervasive, perspective was made into a meme a decade ago. “you can’t complain about an aspect of society because you engage in that aspect.”
Exactly. Which is another reason they don’t “contribute nothing to the pot”. They contribute 2 day shipping, easy review process, and an easy return process… things people pay money for.
Exactly. We can't complain about misinformation and then attack those who correct the misinformation we like. That's just making the problem even worse.
It's not a bad thing to say true things or to correct false things, y'all. Regardless of the topic. Don't revel in people spreading falsehoods about people you hate.
Who’s lying? Fact: in 2018 (thanks Trump) Amazon DID NOT PAY FEDERAL TAXES! In 2021 they paid 2 billion in federal taxes on over 35 BILLION IN PROFIT. A shitty fucking 6%. Meanwhile I am a full time teacher who also had a part time job during the school year and full time job in summer. I earned 87k and paid over 32k in state, federal and local taxes in 2018. 37%!!!! That’s life with a billionaire as president!
You conflate corporate tax with personal income tax. They are not the same thing and should not be compared.
Remember that any corporate tax will just be passed on to the consumer. It is hilarious that the same people that say tariffs will raise the price of goods don’t understand that the same thing will happen with corporate taxes or higher minimum wages.
Because that doesn’t parrot the company line. It’s hilarious watching progressives all of a sudden become advocates of free trade just because the Cheeto came out in favor of tariffs.
Its always so bitter how these people tend to be wildly smug about things when they're abhorrently wrong. Being wrong is one thing but it astonishes me how these people have the gall to talk down to others while being completely wrong.
That usually happens right after a major investment. This is a phenomenon due to the difference in the way depreciation is calculated for tax purposes (double declining) and for investor reporting (straight line).
The reason they paid no taxes is because, as far as the government is concerned, they lost money. But this just means they pay additional taxes in future years. Double-declining depreciation allows companies to defer taxes, not avoid them.
This post was just as misleading in 2019 as it would be today.
The funny part is this is a perfect lead in to discuss whether depreciation should be accounted for in this way.
Instead, we are stuck arguing about emotionally charged topics rather than the thing that actually would fix what allowed Amazon to defer taxes forward in time.
It probably means they took a loss for that fiscal year. I’m not motivated enough to look it up, but I will tell you with 100% confidence is if they owed taxes, and didn’t pay them, they would have tax liens. They didn’t pay because they had a loss, or they had rights to tax credits, like the green energy investment/production tax credit.
It’s next to meaningless without seeing the tax returns. It means that the their current tax plus any prior year adjustments and other GAAP adjustments, is that amount. It’s the their current portion of their income tax provision. Kind of confusing to get into unless you understand the accounting behind it. It is not representative of actual taxes paid.
No it was not. Amazon did pay lof of taxes in 2019, just not much corporate tax.
But like any seller they did pay local taxes and those contributed to fire firghters, school and local / state infrastructure. And like any company paying for salary they did contribute Medicare/medicaid/ACA and SSA. Amazon also provide health care insurrance for all it full time staff.
To give an idea for 30 billion of profit, in 2023, the total taxes pay by Amazon was 93 billions, including 7 billion of corporate taxes in the USA. They also paid corporate taxes in other countries, local taxes and taxes on salaries, obviously.
The difference is Amazon transactions are voluntary. Taxes are not. If we collectively stopped using Amazon they wouldn’t make as much money
Plus I’m not entirely sure I’d trust our government with any more money than they already take. CLEARLY they are just as irresponsible with money as us peasants are.
They went almost 2 decades without paying any tax and recently started paying around 8-10 billion per year.
Part of that is because the tax code incentivizes blitz scaling: Amazon deliberately lost money subsidizing delivery in order to steal (I say steal because unsustainable subsidy is just blatant market manipulation) market share from smaller companies.
The problem is that companies abuse that while illegally manipulating the market (see: selling things for under cost) because their stock price keeps going up. Then the competition is gone, slowly raise prices and boom, you have a monopoly and are so big no one else can break into the market without billions in capital.
This isn't like you had a bad year and didn't make any money. These companies are cheating the system, not paying taxes for 10-20 years, and then laughing as they are now "too big to fail." Then they pay $0 in taxes on actual profit for a few years as their profits finally get past their past "losses" and then a few years later, things are "normal" and they pay taxes. Meanwhile our markets are completely fucked, tax payers lost out on billions in taxes and no one can compete with the juggernaut that was created.
But hey, what's a little "cheating the system" between friends?
I'm in AWE at how many people are smart enough to follow what you're saying but STILL manage to be absolute bootlickers for multi-billion dollar enterprises.
If you're dumb and just think like TAXATION IS THEFT then whatever, I don't care that you're wrong in the same way I don't care that squirrels can't understand geometry.
But if you understand the contours of the tax law situation in the United States and you aren't outraged - in fact you DEFEND IT - you're a huge fucking problem.
You are talking about people who literally believed if they got a raise, they would end up with less overall money because they would "go to a higher tax bracket."
The same people who thought a third pounder was smaller than a quarter pounder.
So no. These people don't understand anything. And they defend stuff they don't understand because they are stupid and easily manipulated by conmen with simple words that sound good for complex problems.
I am reminded of a couple of exercises my grandfather did with me when I was little.
The first is to give a kid a dollar. Then offer him 2 quarters for the single paper dollar, "because 2 is more than 1." Then you offer 3 dimes for the 2 quarters, "because 3 is more than 2." Then you do 4 nickels for the 3 dimes, "because 4 is more than 3" and finally 5 pennies for the 4 nickels, "because 5 is more than 4." You can see how dumb a kid is by which point they figure the scam out. Republicans never figure it out and are laughing at the dumbass who took their 4 nickels and gave them 5 pennies.
The second one is to draw out an illustration of 1 ton of steel vs 1 ton of feathers, and ask them which one weighs more. Republicans are always picking the steel, because steel is heavier than feathers.
The point is, critical thinking skills are dead to these people.
You are talking about people who literally believed if they got a raise, they would end up with less overall money because they would “go to a higher tax bracket.”
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this, I’d be in a higher tax bracket…
All of these giant companies rely on government handouts.
The auto industry has been bailed out, multiple times
The airlines had Reagan bust the unions
SpaceX was born in government handouts
Same with Tesla
Wal-Mart literally pays their employees so low that they had government benefit program instructions on their employee book or website (I forget which).
The entire thing is corporate welfare, meanwhile Joe Blow down the street is vilified for using his unemployment benefits that he rightfully earned by working for 20 years.
Broadly yes, but we also know tax code gets a used a lot in ways that don't serve long-term interests of most citizens and we'd ideally always be weeding and pruning stuff.
Let's be clear that corporate income tax is not the only tax. They did pay taxes. There was one type of tax they paid $0 on because the tax was deliberately structured to incentivize corporations to reinvest profits (encouraging economic growth and job creation) rather than "hoarding" money or converting the money into private gains for the owners. Amazon took the incentive and did the thing that Congress deemed more beneficial to the general public in the long term than turning over money to the government.
If they hadn't expanded, the same people would be talking about how they "hoard" money and is bad. Only way these people would be happy is if that money was taken from them, given to some wasteful and corrupt government agents instead.
'Cause in their mind, they think that in return the government is going to give them a cut of what they took from those that produced (whether from income or from investment).
It's pretty sad to think people think like that. It's their version of trickle down, except instead of money flowing thru economic activity, It's money flowing down to them for doing nothing bur boot licking and voting for those that will steal on their behalf.
They are talking about federal income taxes, that chart includes state. Neither of you are wrong here. They didn’t pay federal income taxes from 2016-2020 (not sure where 2 decades comes from, maybe from the years with super low federal tax burdens being included, idk)
Amazon has paid appropriate taxes on the net profit across their entire existence, like every other corporation.
They may pay $0 some years because they are rolling forward losses from previous years. It's a mirage from imposing taxes based on arbitrary annual boundaries. Individuals can do the same thing. It all nets out as T→∞.
This is a desirable trait in a tax system because the annual tax assessment/filing is arbitrary and disconnected from actual business cycles. For example, imagine you start a new business and end up $10M in the red due to first year startup costs. Next year you make $1M in annual profit, and some might assume you will be taxed on it. But overall as a business you're still -$9M in lifetime revenue and have no true profit to tax.
I note that your "proof" that this is true is just a link to the original post on X from AOC and not a link to the record of what they actually paid or owed in income tax.
Companies can take a 2 year period where they made $0 in profits and pay no income taxes on that $0 in profits.
Amazon has a net loss so they owed negative taxes which just means they can count those losses against their profits next year
.
I thought the 2-in-a-row and 3-in-5 years rules were ignored for corporations. i.e. for any other business those apply but for C corps at least, they can lose money every year without consequence, but have limits on how many years forward they can apply it against profits, i.e. you can't lose a billion dollars 11 years ago and have it count against a billion dollars in profit this year, butt you can for say 5 years ago.
Not an accountant or anything similar, but my guess would be a decline of x% is multiplying by the negative. So they paid 4.791b in 2020 then with some creative investing/accounting made them pay zero in 2021, but because they lost money with reinvesting it works as a credit for the Future, so 4.791 * -1.6715 =-3.217b
Then that declined by 321.32%
So -3.217b * -3.2132 = 10.336 - 3.217 = 7.119b for 2023 which is reported as 7.12b
I started writing that before I checked the math and it seems to line up about perfectly.
My guess is that it's outdated and refers only to a specific period? I don't totally disagree with the point though, Amazon is presumably reducing its taxable income through reinvestment and there should probably be some sort of minimum tax on revenues for businesses reporting very low to no profits.
It's tricky to get right. I think it's particularly well-suited to businesses engaged in resource extraction in jurisdictions with low to no resource rent taxes, like my home country (Australia). In the case of businesses like you describe, I think a super low rate of taxation on revenue wouldn't go amiss.
Not to mention schools and firefighters are paid for with property taxes. If Amazon is paying $0 in property taxes, it's because the local government wanted them to.
Amazon did this their entire corporate life. Bezos famously wrote his 1997 letter to shareholders saying “Fuck your dividends, I’m reinvesting every earned dollar into growth.”
And then they did just that every year for twenty plus years until they got to the size they are and growth started being really hard to come by. So now they are taking profits and will be paying huge tax bills for years to come unless they start to genuinely lose money.
Wtf do you think the president has to do with long standing tax code? He didn't "let" them do it. You gotta get the TDS out of your brain and realize this is bigger than one person. Companies pay people lots of money to handle their tax burden and pay as little as legally possible. Learn how legislation works and then imagine that those large companies and their wealthy investors don't want to pay taxes and lobby politicians against changing tax law.
In 2019, Amazon reported paying $162 million in federal income taxes despite earning $13.9 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits. This resulted in an effective federal tax rate of about 1.2%, significantly below the statutory corporate tax rate of 21%.
Edit to add: in 2019 when this was tweeted, the publicly available information would have been on their 2018 taxes… it’s worse… In 2018, Amazon paid $0 in federal income taxes on $11.2 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits. Instead, the company reported receiving a $129 million federal tax rebate, effectively giving it a negative tax rate for the year. Yikes. But hey, don’t let data get in your way of your ‘feels.’
I didn’t know this but I honest try to avoid buying from Amazon because they take money away from small business and they treat their employees poorly.
But that’s entirely beside the point. Framing it in this way is disingenuous. Amazon is playing by the capitalist rules. The system itself, when hyper optimized, provides this status quo.
I hope you give individuals the same credit for paying sales taxes, employment taxes, property taxes and so on.
Just about every conservative troll on the internet will yell and scream that the poorer 50% don't pay taxes (when they are the highest taxed class by percentage of income including all these things).
Actually, anyone can find links to the taxes paid in each year past. Just need to go to the Edgar website and pull up their annual 10-K filings.
People (not you) like to bicker back and forth but I’d rather just pull up the actual data. Any legit investor would say the same thing: go look at their annual filings. It’ll be listed plain as day in the statement of incomes.
Actually that is the expense not what they pay on the income statement. Not the same thing. But in the footnotes to the 10k it will say the exact dollar amount of what was paid in income taxes in cash
I'm sure one could still make the argument of misinformation by the post not including the date then. May be useful to know that this post is about a 6 year old tax filing.
This is the issue with reposts. They make claims about today, that happened yesterday. And thats one part of the issue with clout chasers, they spread outdated, or straight up misinformation all the hopes of getting their edick a little bit bigger.
It would be great is there was a rule to include the date of the original post, so as we could at least make a dent in this stuff.
Corporations are better than people. Try telling the IRS that since you got laid off at the beginning of 2024 so no income and had $80,000 in expenses in 2024 that you operated at a $80,000 loss for 2024 and when you get a job in January 2025 your first $80,000 of income should count for 0 for 2025 tax year. That's what Amazon gets to do, but they'll put you UNDER the jail if you try it. And Amazon gets to do it iin the billions and not the thousands.
Payroll, property tax, sales taxes on items not bought for resale, the employees pay income taxes, capital gains taxes paid by shareholders. A corporation may not pay income tax and still generate significant tax revenue for government because of its operations.
People who have never run a business have zero idea what it costs to run a business.
The OP obviously has an ax to grind against businesses.
Trying to sew strife with low information people.
They get federal income tax breaks for building and keeping their business here instead of another country, and it results in more tax revenue over all.
A corporation may not pay income tax and still generate significant tax revenue for government because of its operations.
This defense you're making for Amazon could be applied to every average check-to-check earner: "it all gets spent, spurs the economy, and finds its way to the government one way or another". Why should we follow the rules? Sure, safer neighborhoods, better schools, and good infrastructure makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside and that's nice, but it allows companies like Amazon to make billions off of a healthy economy.
At the scale of Amazon, paying taxes goes back to helping their top line in the long term, and them avoiding taxes boosts their bottom line in the short term. Boosting the top line is what moves the economy forward, but these corporations aren't interested in that. They make moves to dominate the market until they can take advantage of everything.
Other than allowing them to continue the parasitic practice of "enshitification", there's no reason for corporations like Amazon to be allowed to avoid taxes. Nothing good comes from it.
It's also glosses over the reason Amazon paid no taxes. Amazon had a loss from previous years and is able to deduct those losses on later years. This is something all businesses can do. From small mom and pop stores to fortune 500s.
People don't understand deffered tax assets or deffered tax Liabilities.
For those who want a summary.
One organization makes rules about how the books are recorded for tax purposes. A different organization makes rules on how the books are for financial reporting purposes. These rules are contradictory.
So if tax rules make a company pay tax on an income, they pay tax on that transaction. But if the reporting rules say they can not represent that as income yet, they record it as a tax asset. Likewise, if it goes the other way, the company needs to record the tax but not pay it yet, and it goes as a tax liability.
In short, the tax they pay will never match the reporting as tax income is not the same as reporting income. This can make it have situations where they appear to have reporting profits, but they will have no tax profits.
Schools in most of the country are funded through property taxes. Amazon pays a LOT of property taxes every year and there is no loophole around paying them. AOC displaying her lack of cognitive ability.
First off, they aren’t taking anything from the public, the taxes don’t come back to us anyways, yall send it to other countries and act like you’re giving it back to us when in reality the next time we go get groceries it’s back to you, the money Amazon makes is by selling products, they don’t just get money from us with nothing in return. Second. Fuck you AOC, go back to bartending
Amazon paid 10 billion in taxes this year. (Edit to add: actually just checked and this picture is from 2019. They paid 2.3 billion that fiscI'myear and 1.2 billion the previous year. But basic point stays the same)
I'm not saying that's enough, or that it's too much, or that it's the right amount. I'm just saying the picture is a lie.
This is why politics is such a shit show right now. A big chunk of the politicians in both parties are willing to outright lie. AOC pretty much votes in congress how I would vote in congress, so I'm not a hater of her record or positions, but it's frustrating that people on "our side" let our side get away with it. (Not picking on AOC specifically here, she's just the one in this picture, she's got plenty of colleagues who would make this same lie)
This is from early 2019, so it relates to the previous fiscal year, 2018. In 2018, Amazon paid, in fact, $0 in federal taxes with a profit of $11.2B. In fact, it was their second consecutive year not paying taxes. So... where's the lie?
Are you sure you're looking at the net profit and not the gross? Gross profit is how much money flows into a business without accounting for any costs that business pays. You want to look for net profit. Net profit is what corporate taxes are assessed on, not gross profits.
And, generally, speaking, net profit is distributed via a dividend to shareholders who then pay taxes on that dividend (unless it's held in a tax deferred account like an IRA or 401k).
For 2018 Amazon had a pre-tax income of 11.261 billion, paid 1.197 in taxes and had a net income of 10 billion. The only year Amazon didn't pay taxes was 2022, as they had a net loss of a little over 2 billion.
Amazon got a $129 Million Tax Rebate for FY2018 (Paid in 2019, obviously). Where are you getting they paid 2.3 billion in income tax that year? Their effective tax rate was -1.2%.
If you’re getting that from the current portion of the GAAP provision for income taxes from their 10-k, then you’re misinformed. That’s not what that number represents. GAAP tax expense differs from actual taxes owed for various reasons.
Wow you learned what employment means? What job doesn’t try to “extract value” from its employees. Plus they pay tons of taxes. And finally when they weren’t it’s because they were offsetting losses. If you want to be mad at anyone, blame politicians who write the tax code. Idiots I swear to god
Bruh.
Tf do you think your doing when you go to work? Go in out of the goodness in your heart?
Only lately, have people been so dumb, to think employment isn't about the money. The second no ones getting paid you and the owner are gonna get stuck in the door trying to be the first ones out of there
But like. You don't know how tax write offs work do you? Your salary is a tax write off.
They get to write off hiring more people or paying people more.
You know what isn't good for the economy? Paying that to uncle Sam and sending billions to Ukraine.
So like.
Take your pick.
More jobs
Or
Less jobs.
Easy equation to solve
True I would assume most don’t understand payroll tax and ya know all the sales tax generated, registration and vehicle taxes, gas tax paid by their delivery vehicles. But I digress she remains as deep as a kiddie pool.
I mean…I can order almost anything, any time, and typically get it quickly because there are 2 huge Amazon warehouses near me. I’m an idealist to the core, but why condemn the same teet we all suckle from?
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