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The article is reluctant to mention the reason why they got those tax rebates, and focuses on the way people feel about it. This seems like bad journalism. Acc

The article is reluctant to mention the reason why they got those tax rebates, and focuses on the way people feel about it. This seems like bad journalism. According to CNBC, “Amazon's low tax bill mainly stemmed from the Republican tax cuts of 2017, carryforward losses from years when the company was not profitable, tax credits for massive investments in R&D and stock-based employee compensation.” https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/04/03/why-amazon-paid-no-federal-income-tax.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/04/03/why-amazon-paid-no-feder... These are the actual things we should be talking about.

civilitty 7y ago
Those all sound like corporate tax policies. That's literally what they're talking about. Clearly, a growing portion of the electorate doesn't like those policies. That's the first step in democracy, no? Engagement?
- lfcc 7y ago
  I agree that engagement and discussing policies is important. But it does feel disingenuous and aimed at provoking outrage (to trigger a knee-jerk reaction) when you just mention a fact like "look at these rich guys that don't share anything!" and ignore the context of why it got to be the way it is. And I'm not saying that there aren't changes that could and should be made. Just that this particular article doesn't have the feel of a fair debate aiming to inform people, but more of an outrage-inducing propaganda.
  - locklock 7y ago
    I'm fine with outrage-inducing propaganda against people who have tens or hundreds of billions of dollars since that class as a whole spends so much time putting out propaganda in their favor. I'm not particularly interested in the details as long as it elevates consciousness about the inherent problems with a society that allows Jeff Bezos to have more money than he could spend in ten thousand lifetimes while millions of people aren't entirely sure how they're going to afford food next week
    - lfcc 7y ago
      Amazon is not Jeff Bezos. Taxing him would be a whole different topic of conversation. Probably more on the topics of executive compensation, taxes for high incomes, and a bunch of other possible subjects. Interesting discussion to be had, for sure, but not what the article is really about.
      - locklock 7y ago
        It all falls under the same umbrella, which as you accurately described as "rich guys who don't share anything" and as far as I'm concerned any amount of elevated consciousness around that is a good thing, even if strictly speaking taking money from Bezos the man and Amazon the company are two separate types of taxation and two different discussions. Bezos and his company Amazon both make almost unfathomable amounts of money and don't pay anywhere near what I'd consider a fair share of it back into society. As Amazon's PR people point out this is legal, naturally, but this article does a good job of contrasting Amazon using every tax trick in the book with normal human beings who aren't able to deduct their expenses for cancer treatment. Likely because the lobby representing the financial interests of individuals with cancer is not all that strong. "Amazon doesn’t pay taxes, but I pay taxes" is a very good sound byte from this, even if the reasons why that's the case are obviously more complicated.
        BangaloreMash 7y ago
        what I'd consider a fair share of it back into society The "fair" share would be a fixed amount of money. Everything else is unfair as it means that some people should pay for others. The sad state of things is that progressive taxes are unfair, but inevitable.
        fjsolwmv 7y ago
        Amazon is not a human person. Which human people pay too little taxes for the wealth they receive or consume? That's what matters.
    - delecti 7y ago
      > Jeff Bezos to have more money Out of all the rich people we could talk about, Bezos is actually one of the ones I have the least problem with. Bezos has a lot of money, but he doesn't have tens of billions of dollars of "money". His net worth is mostly tied up in Amazon ownership, and if he tried to liquidate more than a small fraction of it then it'd suddenly be worth much less, both because of increased supply, and because Amazon's value is very tied up in his ability to drive the company. Maybe we could talk about problems with a system that allow Amazon to be worth as much as it is, but for the founder of a company to be worth a lot because they built a big company, that doesn't seem like a problem to me.
  - jrumbut 7y ago
    I thought this (among other paragraphs) provided context: "Though both parties have sought to lower the top corporate tax rate in the last decade — President Barack Obama proposed lowering it from 35 percent to 28 percent — Republicans in 2017 pushed it down to 21 percent, in addition to expanding some generous tax breaks. The new law allowed immediate expensing of capital expenditures, for example, in order to goose investment. That was one of the primary reasons that more corporations paid no federal taxes, according to the report. Mr. Trump and his Republican allies argued that the tax changes would stimulate investment and economic growth. That has happened, though not by as much as they predicted." There's no debate here, the article was written by one person. It juxtaposes several facts (changes in tax law over the last 10 years, a group of profitable corporations with an effective corporate tax rate of 0 (or negative), poll results, factory closings, and a number of statements by presidential contenders) and, for context, adds a handful of statements from voters and minor activists to give the reader a sense of of how voters in Ohio are viewing these changes. It's full of charts and dates and numbers. While the title is a little provocative, I find the body text to be informative and interesting, and feel the temperature is kept relatively low given the extremely contentious subject matter.
    - lfcc 7y ago
      It mentions tax rate laws, but those don't actually cover why Amazon effectively paid no taxes. I.e. massive investments in R&D, stock-based employee compensation, carry-forwards losses, and whatever else I may still be missing. I don't think it can be considered fairly informative if it doesn't cover how we got to those values. From reading this article, one could still ask if a tax rate is at 21%, how does that mean a profitable company doesn't pay any taxes?
      - jrumbut 7y ago
        I don't think its an article about Amazon's tax bill as such. It's about how Ohio voters and presidential candidates are reacting to Amazon and several other firms' effective tax rates. If they went through what Amazon and Goodyear and GM and Duke Energy all did then they would just be rehashing the report that they conveniently linked.
  - Shivetya 7y ago
    jealousy leading to anger is all part of the political play book and the NYT is there to serve its political masters by running stories that will soon be picked up by candidates to run with. it is all part and parcel with an upcoming election. get your direction from the PAC you deny feeds you stuff, write an article with enough truth in it to pass muster but leaving out enough to make a "rational" decision. Thereby upsetting people by appealing to jealousy, envy, and such, by playing on their morals. After all everyone is for justice, protecting children, the environment, and fairness, aren't they? tripe like this doesn't belong on HN but with the election season spinning up we will get flooded with both direct and indirect stories that are politically driven.
    - civilitty 7y ago
      Right, except the candidate with the most detailed and thought out policies designed to tackle these issues (and one of the front runners currently) is Elizabeth Warren, a senator who has built her career doing the exact opposite of what you're claiming. The vast, vast majority of her funding comes from individual contributions and the vast majority of the rest comes from such "lobbying powerhouses" like Emily's List. Are you seriously claiming that the NYT's political master is the woman who spearheaded the CFPB? Intellectually void "everyone is corrupt why cant the sheeple see" tripe is best saved for Reddit.
  - civilitty 7y ago
    Fair enough. I agree that the word count would much better be spent on discussing the relevant legislation and resulting tax codes. But let me be honest. I wouldn't read that story. I'm not a tax policy wonk, nor am I qualified to opine on the legislative process except to express exasperation at the gridlock. I am however qualified to vote for candidates who are and that first requires awareness of the issues, a topic orthogonal to a precise understanding of the solutions, just like I need a doctor to tell me what to do about my infection after the pain has brought attention to it, not explain the intricate details of how assays work or how antibiotics disrupt bacterial functions.
    - cascom 7y ago
      The problem is that the NYT ignored the why almost entirely to generate outrage because they are creating an issue. Most people wouldn’t be outraged if you said “this company didn’t pay tax this year on its $2B in profits because it lost $1B last year, and invested $1B in a new research facility (and got accelerated depreciation)”
    - bryan_w 7y ago
      > I'm not a tax policy wonk, nor am I qualified to opine Which makes it so easy for the NYT to manipulate you into jealous frenzy. A lot of people see an outrageous headline and too few ask "what's the other side of the story?" The media knows this and can use it to direct your ire at any of their competitors because it's so effective
      - civilitty 7y ago
        The other side of it is what my personal and business's accountants do. I don't need to know the intricate details of their work to look at the final bill and realize that maybe I should be paying more for the benefits I enjoy in this country, especially considering my native tax rate - which gets me a hell of a lot less in Russia than the nearly equivalent effective rate does in the US.
- AlexTWithBeard 7y ago
  No. The only thing worse than a fool is an engaged fool. First educate the people, then crank up the engagement. Doing it in the opposite order is a recipe for disaster.
  - kamarg 7y ago
    That kind of sounds like you're saying "These people aren't smart enough to have a say in how their lives are run".
    - benchaney 7y ago
      That isn’t what he is saying at all. No one is smart enough to make good decisions while uninformed.
- SilasX 7y ago
  I thought it was education. Like, about why carry-forwards make sense. If there's a (somewhat) reflectively consistent reason why we want to break the "only tax profits" model, and voters generally understand the tradeoffs, great, that sounds like a good debate to have. As it stands, like the OP suggests, it comes off more as misleading rabble-rousing.
chii 7y ago
> carryforward losses from years when the company was not profitable yes, this definitely should be talked about. Why can't people's income be carried forward like this as well? If i made a lot of money one year, why can't i claim away taxes from years that i didn't make income (such that my tax bracket is lower)?
- namdnay 7y ago
  Not making money is not the same as making losses. You can carry forwards losses you've made on investments.
  - lugg 7y ago
    > Not making money is not the same as making losses. I have rent and bills to pay regardless of whether I'm making money, that is the definition of making a loss.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      Rent and bills are (in general) not deductible expenses.
      - chii 7y ago
        but the rent and bills of a corporation are deductable? Why is it different? A corporation has the same legal rights as a person, but a person has to pay more for these rights. It's unfair imho.
        sokoloff 7y ago
        Ordinary and necessary business expenses (expenses incurred with a reasonable overall expectation of profit) are, in general, deductible in the US because we tax income. Personal expenses are not. People end up paying all taxes anyway, just sometimes one or two steps removed from the legal entity/TIN who files the returns.
        7y ago
TheBobinator 7y ago
Go look at Amazon's 8k and 10k filings; If memory serves it wasn't until 2015 or 2016 they turned a profit after almost 2 decades. It's been illegal, under racketeering laws, to sell at a loss in order to capture a market for a long, long time, and that's the real story here. Republicans and Democrats have let that one go; blaming political parties is a straw-man argument. They expect to utter the words and hope you believe it and not fight what they're doing. In 2008 after the crash the retail industry switched to hiring part-time jobs only; Wal-mart, Meijer, Kroger, almost everyone and a lot of that was due to pricing pressure from online retail namely E-bay and to a larger extent Amazon. People began working 3 or 4 unstable part time jobs to piece together 60+hr weeks in order to make ends meet and still living in destitution (not having savings for a car or house repair). Many turned to drugs and alcohol to deal with the trauma of being in a sitaution where that looked to be a permanent state of affairs. Today, Wal-mart has stopped drug testing new hires, they've implimented a drug rehab program for new hires because they drug test 100 people and literally 99 fail. Other retailers and employers are doing the same. Any company that views it's customers as the product ultimately is looking to do what anyone does with a product once they are done with it; throw it into the garbage. CNBC is filling your head with garbage and turning you into garbage just like Amazon and the retail industry did to those retail workers I just mentioned; now they get to clean up their mess. Those people get to lose a good 15-20 years of productive live due to this. You have literally nothing to gain by listening to them whatsoever; take a news literacy course and invest a little bit of money on real journalism.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  Not turning a profit does not mean or even imply selling at loss at all.
  - lugg 7y ago
    It does actually. Cost of doing business includes all costs. If amazon believes they need to spend money on R&D then that R&D is a cost of doing business, if its not turning a profit with that R&D spending then the business is not sustainable by definition. Amazon was not doing R&D for shits and giggles. Just because the time horizon was long doesn't mean it wasn't any less of a requirement for their success. Amazon would not be in the same place it is today if not for that expenditure so claiming it wasn't a "cost" is just disingenuous.
netcan 7y ago
>>These are the actual things we should be talking about. I (hesitantly) disagree. That specific tax policy change is a tree in a vast forest. It happens to be relevant here, but without it... It's not like Amazon, Google, apple, etc would have paid anywhere near the simple tax rate had that legislation not been enacted. Amazon had a different loophole/strategy in 2016 and will have another one for whenever the 2017 one expires whatnot. Ultimately, corporate income tax has been broken for over 50 years, and it's been brought ken internationally, not just in the US. ...broken in the sense that the "rate" can be 35%, 23% or whatever and the total tax raised in an economy some number unrelated to that. Reporting the way you suggest implies that in 2016 things were different, or that canceling that policy will yield a meaningfully different result. That's not the case.
- lfcc 7y ago
  > (...) It happens to be relevant here (...) Then it should be discussed. Along with the policies already mentioned in the article and it's disingenuous not to do so. How can we expect to make informed decisions if we selectively choose what information to expose or hide for discussion?
noworld 7y ago
I wish there were individual income tax credits for R&D work.
fatnoah 7y ago
>and stock-based employee compensation. Do we have any more information on this line item? I'm in a position where over 1/2 of my income is via RSU grants from my employer. If those are deductible from corporate taxes, that seems to make sense since they are treated as regular income to the recipients, just like salaries (other payroll taxes, etc. are another story). I know there are other forms of equity-based compensation as well. I'm curious to see how these things work.
- cascom 7y ago
  This is a good article on the subject https://hbr.org/2009/08/expensing-stock-options-the-co https://hbr.org/2009/08/expensing-stock-options-the-co

civilitty 7y ago

Those all sound like corporate tax policies. That's literally what they're talking about. Clearly, a growing portion of the electorate doesn't like those policies. That's the first step in democracy, no? Engagement?

lfcc 7y ago
I agree that engagement and discussing policies is important. But it does feel disingenuous and aimed at provoking outrage (to trigger a knee-jerk reaction) when you just mention a fact like "look at these rich guys that don't share anything!" and ignore the context of why it got to be the way it is. And I'm not saying that there aren't changes that could and should be made. Just that this particular article doesn't have the feel of a fair debate aiming to inform people, but more of an outrage-inducing propaganda.
- locklock 7y ago
  I'm fine with outrage-inducing propaganda against people who have tens or hundreds of billions of dollars since that class as a whole spends so much time putting out propaganda in their favor. I'm not particularly interested in the details as long as it elevates consciousness about the inherent problems with a society that allows Jeff Bezos to have more money than he could spend in ten thousand lifetimes while millions of people aren't entirely sure how they're going to afford food next week
  - lfcc 7y ago
    Amazon is not Jeff Bezos. Taxing him would be a whole different topic of conversation. Probably more on the topics of executive compensation, taxes for high incomes, and a bunch of other possible subjects. Interesting discussion to be had, for sure, but not what the article is really about.
    - locklock 7y ago
      It all falls under the same umbrella, which as you accurately described as "rich guys who don't share anything" and as far as I'm concerned any amount of elevated consciousness around that is a good thing, even if strictly speaking taking money from Bezos the man and Amazon the company are two separate types of taxation and two different discussions. Bezos and his company Amazon both make almost unfathomable amounts of money and don't pay anywhere near what I'd consider a fair share of it back into society. As Amazon's PR people point out this is legal, naturally, but this article does a good job of contrasting Amazon using every tax trick in the book with normal human beings who aren't able to deduct their expenses for cancer treatment. Likely because the lobby representing the financial interests of individuals with cancer is not all that strong. "Amazon doesn’t pay taxes, but I pay taxes" is a very good sound byte from this, even if the reasons why that's the case are obviously more complicated.
      - BangaloreMash 7y ago
        what I'd consider a fair share of it back into society The "fair" share would be a fixed amount of money. Everything else is unfair as it means that some people should pay for others. The sad state of things is that progressive taxes are unfair, but inevitable.
      - fjsolwmv 7y ago
        Amazon is not a human person. Which human people pay too little taxes for the wealth they receive or consume? That's what matters.
  - delecti 7y ago
    > Jeff Bezos to have more money Out of all the rich people we could talk about, Bezos is actually one of the ones I have the least problem with. Bezos has a lot of money, but he doesn't have tens of billions of dollars of "money". His net worth is mostly tied up in Amazon ownership, and if he tried to liquidate more than a small fraction of it then it'd suddenly be worth much less, both because of increased supply, and because Amazon's value is very tied up in his ability to drive the company. Maybe we could talk about problems with a system that allow Amazon to be worth as much as it is, but for the founder of a company to be worth a lot because they built a big company, that doesn't seem like a problem to me.
- jrumbut 7y ago
  I thought this (among other paragraphs) provided context: "Though both parties have sought to lower the top corporate tax rate in the last decade — President Barack Obama proposed lowering it from 35 percent to 28 percent — Republicans in 2017 pushed it down to 21 percent, in addition to expanding some generous tax breaks. The new law allowed immediate expensing of capital expenditures, for example, in order to goose investment. That was one of the primary reasons that more corporations paid no federal taxes, according to the report. Mr. Trump and his Republican allies argued that the tax changes would stimulate investment and economic growth. That has happened, though not by as much as they predicted." There's no debate here, the article was written by one person. It juxtaposes several facts (changes in tax law over the last 10 years, a group of profitable corporations with an effective corporate tax rate of 0 (or negative), poll results, factory closings, and a number of statements by presidential contenders) and, for context, adds a handful of statements from voters and minor activists to give the reader a sense of of how voters in Ohio are viewing these changes. It's full of charts and dates and numbers. While the title is a little provocative, I find the body text to be informative and interesting, and feel the temperature is kept relatively low given the extremely contentious subject matter.
  - lfcc 7y ago
    It mentions tax rate laws, but those don't actually cover why Amazon effectively paid no taxes. I.e. massive investments in R&D, stock-based employee compensation, carry-forwards losses, and whatever else I may still be missing. I don't think it can be considered fairly informative if it doesn't cover how we got to those values. From reading this article, one could still ask if a tax rate is at 21%, how does that mean a profitable company doesn't pay any taxes?
    - jrumbut 7y ago
      I don't think its an article about Amazon's tax bill as such. It's about how Ohio voters and presidential candidates are reacting to Amazon and several other firms' effective tax rates. If they went through what Amazon and Goodyear and GM and Duke Energy all did then they would just be rehashing the report that they conveniently linked.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  jealousy leading to anger is all part of the political play book and the NYT is there to serve its political masters by running stories that will soon be picked up by candidates to run with. it is all part and parcel with an upcoming election. get your direction from the PAC you deny feeds you stuff, write an article with enough truth in it to pass muster but leaving out enough to make a "rational" decision. Thereby upsetting people by appealing to jealousy, envy, and such, by playing on their morals. After all everyone is for justice, protecting children, the environment, and fairness, aren't they? tripe like this doesn't belong on HN but with the election season spinning up we will get flooded with both direct and indirect stories that are politically driven.
  - civilitty 7y ago
    Right, except the candidate with the most detailed and thought out policies designed to tackle these issues (and one of the front runners currently) is Elizabeth Warren, a senator who has built her career doing the exact opposite of what you're claiming. The vast, vast majority of her funding comes from individual contributions and the vast majority of the rest comes from such "lobbying powerhouses" like Emily's List. Are you seriously claiming that the NYT's political master is the woman who spearheaded the CFPB? Intellectually void "everyone is corrupt why cant the sheeple see" tripe is best saved for Reddit.
- civilitty 7y ago
  Fair enough. I agree that the word count would much better be spent on discussing the relevant legislation and resulting tax codes. But let me be honest. I wouldn't read that story. I'm not a tax policy wonk, nor am I qualified to opine on the legislative process except to express exasperation at the gridlock. I am however qualified to vote for candidates who are and that first requires awareness of the issues, a topic orthogonal to a precise understanding of the solutions, just like I need a doctor to tell me what to do about my infection after the pain has brought attention to it, not explain the intricate details of how assays work or how antibiotics disrupt bacterial functions.
  - cascom 7y ago
    The problem is that the NYT ignored the why almost entirely to generate outrage because they are creating an issue. Most people wouldn’t be outraged if you said “this company didn’t pay tax this year on its $2B in profits because it lost $1B last year, and invested $1B in a new research facility (and got accelerated depreciation)”
  - bryan_w 7y ago
    > I'm not a tax policy wonk, nor am I qualified to opine Which makes it so easy for the NYT to manipulate you into jealous frenzy. A lot of people see an outrageous headline and too few ask "what's the other side of the story?" The media knows this and can use it to direct your ire at any of their competitors because it's so effective
    - civilitty 7y ago
      The other side of it is what my personal and business's accountants do. I don't need to know the intricate details of their work to look at the final bill and realize that maybe I should be paying more for the benefits I enjoy in this country, especially considering my native tax rate - which gets me a hell of a lot less in Russia than the nearly equivalent effective rate does in the US.
AlexTWithBeard 7y ago
No. The only thing worse than a fool is an engaged fool. First educate the people, then crank up the engagement. Doing it in the opposite order is a recipe for disaster.
- kamarg 7y ago
  That kind of sounds like you're saying "These people aren't smart enough to have a say in how their lives are run".
  - benchaney 7y ago
    That isn’t what he is saying at all. No one is smart enough to make good decisions while uninformed.
SilasX 7y ago
I thought it was education. Like, about why carry-forwards make sense. If there's a (somewhat) reflectively consistent reason why we want to break the "only tax profits" model, and voters generally understand the tradeoffs, great, that sounds like a good debate to have. As it stands, like the OP suggests, it comes off more as misleading rabble-rousing.

chii 7y ago

> carryforward losses from years when the company was not profitable yes, this definitely should be talked about. Why can't people's income be carried forward like this as well? If i made a lot of money one year, why can't i claim away taxes from years that i didn't make income (such that my tax bracket is lower)?

namdnay 7y ago
Not making money is not the same as making losses. You can carry forwards losses you've made on investments.
- lugg 7y ago
  > Not making money is not the same as making losses. I have rent and bills to pay regardless of whether I'm making money, that is the definition of making a loss.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Rent and bills are (in general) not deductible expenses.
    - chii 7y ago
      but the rent and bills of a corporation are deductable? Why is it different? A corporation has the same legal rights as a person, but a person has to pay more for these rights. It's unfair imho.
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        Ordinary and necessary business expenses (expenses incurred with a reasonable overall expectation of profit) are, in general, deductible in the US because we tax income. Personal expenses are not. People end up paying all taxes anyway, just sometimes one or two steps removed from the legal entity/TIN who files the returns.
      - 7y ago

TheBobinator 7y ago

Go look at Amazon's 8k and 10k filings; If memory serves it wasn't until 2015 or 2016 they turned a profit after almost 2 decades. It's been illegal, under racketeering laws, to sell at a loss in order to capture a market for a long, long time, and that's the real story here. Republicans and Democrats have let that one go; blaming political parties is a straw-man argument. They expect to utter the words and hope you believe it and not fight what they're doing. In 2008 after the crash the retail industry switched to hiring part-time jobs only; Wal-mart, Meijer, Kroger, almost everyone and a lot of that was due to pricing pressure from online retail namely E-bay and to a larger extent Amazon. People began working 3 or 4 unstable part time jobs to piece together 60+hr weeks in order to make ends meet and still living in destitution (not having savings for a car or house repair). Many turned to drugs and alcohol to deal with the trauma of being in a sitaution where that looked to be a permanent state of affairs. Today, Wal-mart has stopped drug testing new hires, they've implimented a drug rehab program for new hires because they drug test 100 people and literally 99 fail. Other retailers and employers are doing the same. Any company that views it's customers as the product ultimately is looking to do what anyone does with a product once they are done with it; throw it into the garbage. CNBC is filling your head with garbage and turning you into garbage just like Amazon and the retail industry did to those retail workers I just mentioned; now they get to clean up their mess. Those people get to lose a good 15-20 years of productive live due to this. You have literally nothing to gain by listening to them whatsoever; take a news literacy course and invest a little bit of money on real journalism.

TomMarius 7y ago
Not turning a profit does not mean or even imply selling at loss at all.
- lugg 7y ago
  It does actually. Cost of doing business includes all costs. If amazon believes they need to spend money on R&D then that R&D is a cost of doing business, if its not turning a profit with that R&D spending then the business is not sustainable by definition. Amazon was not doing R&D for shits and giggles. Just because the time horizon was long doesn't mean it wasn't any less of a requirement for their success. Amazon would not be in the same place it is today if not for that expenditure so claiming it wasn't a "cost" is just disingenuous.

netcan 7y ago

>>These are the actual things we should be talking about. I (hesitantly) disagree. That specific tax policy change is a tree in a vast forest. It happens to be relevant here, but without it... It's not like Amazon, Google, apple, etc would have paid anywhere near the simple tax rate had that legislation not been enacted. Amazon had a different loophole/strategy in 2016 and will have another one for whenever the 2017 one expires whatnot. Ultimately, corporate income tax has been broken for over 50 years, and it's been brought ken internationally, not just in the US. ...broken in the sense that the "rate" can be 35%, 23% or whatever and the total tax raised in an economy some number unrelated to that. Reporting the way you suggest implies that in 2016 things were different, or that canceling that policy will yield a meaningfully different result. That's not the case.

lfcc 7y ago
> (...) It happens to be relevant here (...) Then it should be discussed. Along with the policies already mentioned in the article and it's disingenuous not to do so. How can we expect to make informed decisions if we selectively choose what information to expose or hide for discussion?

noworld 7y ago

I wish there were individual income tax credits for R&D work.

fatnoah 7y ago

>and stock-based employee compensation. Do we have any more information on this line item? I'm in a position where over 1/2 of my income is via RSU grants from my employer. If those are deductible from corporate taxes, that seems to make sense since they are treated as regular income to the recipients, just like salaries (other payroll taxes, etc. are another story). I know there are other forms of equity-based compensation as well. I'm curious to see how these things work.

cascom 7y ago
This is a good article on the subject https://hbr.org/2009/08/expensing-stock-options-the-co https://hbr.org/2009/08/expensing-stock-options-the-co