Ask HN: Is there a quick summary of how much tax various corporations pay?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868103

by kwdc • 6 years ago

18 13 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I think it would be insightful to see how much tax various corporations pay versus revenue. Especially when they provide their opinions on public policy and expect action / exemptions / allowances / subsidies.

Anyone have any pointers?

runawaybottle• 6 years ago

I think we’d want real taxes paid, which many people have parroted as ‘zero’ for a long time (I think Sanders claimed this for Amazon recently).

You’d think there would be a simple site where you can look up a company ticker symbol and see a straight taxes-paid number and how much is off-shored to mitigate tax burden.

londons_explore• 6 years ago

What if places like the NYSE started saying that quarterly reports are no longer allowed to report on revenue and profits, and are only allowed to report on taxes paid and dividends.

Then investors will have to guess revenue and profit figures from how much tax was paid. Suddenly companies have no incentive to hide revenue behind obscure schemes because their shareholders can't reward them for it.

prepend• 6 years ago

Companies would have massive incentives to hide revenue.

If we didn’t force companies to reveal revenue and only required tax and dividend, then there would be many ways to manipulate their stock.

Want to look successful? Borrow money and pay out a huge dividend.

Don’t need capital, pay zero taxes by offsetting private revenue. Offset forever paying no tax, issuing no dividends and just buying back stock.

trestenhortz• 6 years ago

Here’s a quick summary: “very little”.

sloaken• 6 years ago

I would like to see which corporations exploit which loopholes: 1) How much they saved on taxes, verses cost of loophole 2) Which loopholes are exploited for the most $.

giantg22• 6 years ago

Some of them aren't true loopholes. They might be taking advantage of programs that were created to further the agenda, just as many deductions and credits for individuals. ie green energy write-offs

Rastonbury• 6 years ago

Publicly listed companies have financial statements by which you can calculate their effective tax rates.

giantg22• 6 years ago

But for those numbers to be meaningful you would need to see how/why they pay what they do. Some companies might pay less tax than others, but that might be due to legitimate tax write-offs.

jokethrowaway• 6 years ago

It's a very tricky problem to solve at the individual company level. There are many things to consider and nothing prevents business from just spending more or moving money abroad to avoid taxes. If a business is big enough to have someone optimising their taxes, they're likely keeping only a proportion of profits in the USA based on how much they want to redistribute to the owners.

In general, Corporate Tax Income is roughly 1-2% of Gross Domestic Product.

Also, big business in the USA lobbies ~3bln per year - it's money going from business to the government, albeit I'd class it more as corruption than taxes.

It's anyway much less than what you pay in %. As it's normal when you have a central corruptible government: whoever holds the more power will get the better treatment. If Amazon leaves the USA, tons of workers are going to become unemployed. If you leave the USA, it doesn't change much (especially because you'll keep on paying taxes until you renounce your citizenship).

kwdc• 6 years ago

It seems like this kind of information would be trivially available in a democracy because not knowing it is an impediment to informed voting. Especially when people are on various committees and lobby groups are involved.

Speaks to bias, vested interests etc. Modern democracies should have more data about who is doing what and why.

This goes beyond just tax. But it would certainly be informative.

d33lio2• 6 years ago

Smart people use loopholes. They are legal so why wouldn't you pay less tax?

If you hate large companies not paying their share, encourage government to do their fucking job and legislate in order to prevent companies from cheating the fed out of billions. Ironically, (as much as I hate the guy) Trump is the only president in recent history who's made clever moves to target Amazon. Unfortunately, companies lobby to have their tax cheating ignored by congress and government at large.

This is glaringly obvious, when Biden criticizes trump and rich americans for "cheating" on taxes where his returns clearly show he uses similar - sometimes identical means of dodging taxes.

fiftyacorn• 5 years ago

The problem is the rich and big businesses lobby for loopholes, and there is a revolving door between tax authorities and tax companies to exploit these loopholes

One of the motivations of the backers of brexit was to avoid EU tax regulation

d33lio2• 5 years ago

Agreed, but this kind of lobbying is equally distributed across party lines. The fact that half of Biden's cabinet is made of of ex FaceBook execs is just one example of that, similar to Bush's cabinet being packed with ex oil execs...

Ask HN: Is there a quick summary of how much tax various corporations pay?

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