Outcast_Searcher wrote:Let's pretend companies like Amazon don't pay a hell of a lot of taxes. Or employ a hell of a lot of people (with likely much more to come, as they grow, over time). And let's also pretend that NYC wouldn't get any financial benefit from Amazon going in there as planned.
Hmmm, let's pretend companies like Amazon don't pay taxes at all. Oops...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-polic ... 75e129912f"Amazon, the e-commerce giant helmed by the world’s richest man, paid no federal taxes on profit of $11.2 billion last year, according to an analysis of the company’s corporate filings by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a progressive think tank.
Thanks to a variety of tax credits and a significant tax break available on pay handed out in the form of company stock, Amazon actually received a federal tax rebate of $129 million last year, giving it an
effective federal tax rate of roughly -1 percent.It is the second year in a row the company has enjoyed a negative federal tax rate on a multibillion dollar profit. That would place the company’s effective federal tax rate below the rate paid by the poorest 20 percent of American households, which had an effective federal tax rate of 1.5 percent in 2015, according to the Tax Policy Center.
...
From 2009 to 2018, the company earned roughly $26.5 billion in profit and paid approximately $791 million in federal taxes, for an effective federal tax rate of 3.0 percent for the period, according to ITEP’s analysis. That is well below the statutory 35 percent corporate tax rate in effect for most of that period, as well as the 21 percent rate ushered in last year with 2017′s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
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Previous ITEP analysis has shown that between 2008 and 2015, profitable Fortune 500 companies paid an average effective federal tax rate of 21.2 percent, well under the statutory 35 percent rate in effect in that period. One hundred of the companies had paid zero or negative tax in at least one profitable year, and 58 of them had multiple zero-tax years while being profitable."
In Europe, Amazon is registered in Luxembourg. Apple is registered in Ireland; I believe in 2014 they paid an effective tax rate of 0.005%. Google's money goes to Ireland, then the Netherlands and then the Bahamas, IIRC. Basically tax-free.
This is 2019. Corporate taxes are history.