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> Amazon and Google say they pay all the taxes they should. Analysts say competitive pressures force companies to seek to minimise all costs, including tax. Am

> Amazon and Google say they pay all the taxes they should. Analysts say competitive pressures force companies to seek to minimise all costs, including tax. Amazon and Google do not have competition. They seek to minimize all costs because that's how they can free the most resources to invest in the product they're offering to consumers. Also, there's no competition when a company gets big and starts lobbying. This is really bad news for everyone; we all lose when bankers steal money from those that provide us goods and services.

grecy 12y ago
No, Amazon and Google seek to minimize all costs so they can increase their profits. Doing this will just reduce their profits a little.
- innguest 12y ago
  And how do they increase their profits? By providing goods and services that customers want. Increasing profits and having your product/service valued and wanted by your consumer base is the same thing. Why do you say "profits" as if it's a bad thing? As the Democrats argued when Grover Cleveland was elected, taxes make goods more expensive and subsidize monopolies. This will be no different.
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    When a blue collar worker can make $30/hr again maybe I'll agree with you. It isn't taxes that's lowering our paychecks (taxes are lower than in the Cleveland's day).
    - innguest 12y ago
      You've got it backwards. Once everyone considers these principles I'm putting forward, then blue collar workers will make $30/h again. Taxes are what is lowering paychecks. Taxing comes in several shapes, including inflation. In this sense, taxes are higher now, since the dollar was pegged to gold then.
      - opendais 12y ago
        No, you have it backwards. The Gold Standard died in 1934 when the President was authorized to devalue the Dollar up to 40%. In the 70s, things were fine. It wasn't until the 80s when the "$30/hr" bit started to fall off. How do you explain 40+ years of reasonable wages going into the crapper over the past 35? Hint: It isn't the Gold Standard which didn't change over this period in any significant way.
        innguest 12y ago
        In economy, changes take a long time to shows symptoms in the system. How long each change takes is anyone's guess. The gradual unpegging of gold had both immediate and long term consequences. In 1971 the US ended the Bretton Woods system, finally freeing the dollar from any pegging. (Thanks for the wrong hint) In 1973 there was the Oil Crisis. In 1979, the Fed switched its monetary policy from targeting the exchange rate to targeting the money supply, believing they were following what they called Neoliberal ideas. Do not confuse this for Libertarianism, as we wouldn't have a central bank targeting this nor that in the first place.
        opendais 12y ago
        > In 1971 the US ended the Bretton Woods system, finally freeing the dollar from any pegging. (Thanks for the wrong hint) Eh? You were complaining about inflation not foreign exchange rates. For reference you said: > In this sense, taxes are higher now, since the dollar was pegged to gold then. http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/ http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-in... http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=1917&year2=1918 http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=1917&ye... You can verify the #s there too, cept by year to give you an idea. 1917-1918? 18% inflation Let me point out a few lines for you: 1917 12.5 15.4 14.3 18.9 19.6 20.4 18.5 19.3 19.8 19.5 17.4 18.1 17.4 1918 19.7 17.5 16.7 12.7 13.3 13.1 18.0 18.5 18.0 18.5 20.7 20.4 18.0 1919 17.9 14.9 17.1 17.6 16.6 15.0 15.2 14.9 13.4 13.1 13.5 14.5 14.6 1934 2.3 4.7 5.6 5.6 5.6 5.5 2.3 1.5 3.0 2.3 2.3 1.5 3.1 1935 3.0 3.0 3.0 3.8 3.8 2.2 2.2 2.2 0.7 1.5 2.2 3.0 2.2 Bretton Woods was for handling international exchange rates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Fixed_exchange_rates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Fixed_exch... Do you get it now? Or are you confusing the rate for gold for the rate for real goods [e.g. Food, Housing, Labor] still?
  - notahacker 12y ago
    Taxes also make people have education and not die of preventable diseases, and fund a rule of law and property enforcement which plays a huge role in enabling companies to actually sell the products their customers value. All of these have certainly benefited Amazon and Google (and their shareholders, and their end users) to a far greater degree than the minimal amount of tax they deign to pay in my country where they have multiple offices and generate huge revenues. Tax avoidance, one might say, makes everyone else's taxes more expensive and subsidises monopolies.
  - grecy 12y ago
    > And how do they increase their profits? By providing goods and services that customers want. Or by not paying taxes, thus lowering their expenses. > Why do you say "profits" as if it's a bad thing? Because they're making billions in private profit, at the expense of public good. Public education, healthcare, roads, infrastructure are all severely bad in America. There is a reason for that. > taxes make goods more expensive That's not the entire story. Keeping high profit margins makes goods more expensive. I'm quite certain Amazon, Google or Apple could all drop a couple of zeros from their yearly profit, pay their taxes and the goods would not increase in price. Their profit would still be very large.
    - innguest 12y ago
      What ethics do you have that makes you insist on trying to regulate the behavior of others? What is the philosophy behind it, and how do you deduce that we can achieve peace and prosperity by forcing others to do the will of a small group in power? Who gives anyone the right to steal from Google? I'm not on board with that. There's a reason companies leave the US and it's because it has the highest corporate tax in the world at 35%. Google does not live in the US. It does not owe anything to public education, healthcare, roads or infrastructure. Google is a company that allows me to search on the internet. They get paid to show me ads. I could go on and on about what they are and the topic of "roads" would never figure. If you want to argue that the founders or the employees of Google need to care about education, healthcare, roads, that's another topic, but I'm talking specifically about corporate tax. How is Google making billions at the expense of public good? How much do they owe the public, exactly? Is Google forever indentured to the State? Will it never be free? Are you OK with never being free? I would say Google has provided plenty of goods to the public and it has paid more than its share several times over. We're all better off because it exists, and the service they provide is even free. It's free and you want to make it more expensive. It's almost as if you're angry at how much money they're making. "Keeping high profit margins" is exactly what anyone would do because as human beings we want to feel safe, and high profit margins provide the safety that you will have enough resources to change your course of action if necessary, adapting to new market conditions and consumer demands. You want to erode that safety buffer and make Google more fragile. Your wording says it all: "Google [..] could [...] drop a couple of zeros from their [...] profit". The profits are their reward for supplying something we all want. We all use it daily, it's free, it's amazing and they keep making more cool stuff, and because of that the market has rewarded them. And you're advocating stealing their reward to fix roads. But we don't even know if people want roads! They're there so that's why people use them, but who's to say we don't want something better? Well, we'll never know, because the State said "roads it is" and they're sticking to it, even when the upkeep gets harder and harder. Is the State looking into alternatives to roads? No? We went through a bunch of search companies like AltaVista and Lycos and so on and it took all this time to realize Google was what we wanted, and we've rewarded them for that. What is the State doing to foster a bunch of alternative ways of transportation in order to pick the best so we can reward it? Oh, you mean you just want roads period, and you want to force everyone to pay for this product, and you don't think there could be alternatives so that's why you're not looking into competing ideas? So let's force Google to pay for this product that was artificially designed and not evolved from market forces like Google's product were? And Google should pay up because it has so much money and it would still be profitable if it sacrificed a few zeroes? Can you please justify this line of thinking to me ethically? Here we have two organizations, one puts out a crummy product it can't maintain, and the other puts out a good product that people said they would pay for; and you're saying we should take money from the successful product and use it to build more of the unsuccessful product. Do you see what I see? Because from here it's clear the solution would be for the State to simply stop making crummy products and stop stealing from successful products, but somehow we've escalated this problem all the way to the level of global corporate taxes.
bitJericho 12y ago
Amazon and Google are in fact direct competitors in a number of areas. There's also all kinds of competitors. Ebay, Barnes & Noble, MS, Yahoo, etc. It's about time companies start paying their fair share of taxes. Not only that, it's about time to start raising their tax rates since they don't care about paying employees a living wage.
- ars 12y ago
  > It's about time companies start paying their fair share of taxes. Why should companies even pay tax in the first place? The owners should pay tax on profits, but why should the corporation itself pay tax? > Not only that, it's about time to start raising their tax rates since they don't care about paying employees a living wage. How can you possibly not realize that if you increase their tax burden they will lower salaries? Do you think there is a magic pot of money that corporations can draw from to pay the tax?
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    > Do you think there is a magic pot of money that corporations can draw from to pay the tax? Yes it's called the CEO's 30,000x higher salary. > Why should companies even pay tax in the first place? The owners should pay tax on profits, but why should the corporation itself pay tax? Because a corporation's losses cannot harm the owner's personal wealth. A corporation therefore should pay taxes in order to cover that particular expense to society.
    - ars 12y ago
      > Yes it's called the CEO's 30,000x higher salary. That wouldn't work. The CEO would just go to another company, and it's REALLY hard to find good CEO - there's a reason they are paid so much. Also, with the kinds of companies affected by this the CEO doesn't get paid at all. The owner only earns any profits, but draws no separate salary. > Because a corporation's losses cannot harm the owner's personal wealth. That's a surprisingly good answer.

grecy 12y ago

No, Amazon and Google seek to minimize all costs so they can increase their profits. Doing this will just reduce their profits a little.

innguest 12y ago
And how do they increase their profits? By providing goods and services that customers want. Increasing profits and having your product/service valued and wanted by your consumer base is the same thing. Why do you say "profits" as if it's a bad thing? As the Democrats argued when Grover Cleveland was elected, taxes make goods more expensive and subsidize monopolies. This will be no different.
- bitJericho 12y ago
  When a blue collar worker can make $30/hr again maybe I'll agree with you. It isn't taxes that's lowering our paychecks (taxes are lower than in the Cleveland's day).
  - innguest 12y ago
    You've got it backwards. Once everyone considers these principles I'm putting forward, then blue collar workers will make $30/h again. Taxes are what is lowering paychecks. Taxing comes in several shapes, including inflation. In this sense, taxes are higher now, since the dollar was pegged to gold then.
    - opendais 12y ago
      No, you have it backwards. The Gold Standard died in 1934 when the President was authorized to devalue the Dollar up to 40%. In the 70s, things were fine. It wasn't until the 80s when the "$30/hr" bit started to fall off. How do you explain 40+ years of reasonable wages going into the crapper over the past 35? Hint: It isn't the Gold Standard which didn't change over this period in any significant way.
      - innguest 12y ago
        In economy, changes take a long time to shows symptoms in the system. How long each change takes is anyone's guess. The gradual unpegging of gold had both immediate and long term consequences. In 1971 the US ended the Bretton Woods system, finally freeing the dollar from any pegging. (Thanks for the wrong hint) In 1973 there was the Oil Crisis. In 1979, the Fed switched its monetary policy from targeting the exchange rate to targeting the money supply, believing they were following what they called Neoliberal ideas. Do not confuse this for Libertarianism, as we wouldn't have a central bank targeting this nor that in the first place.
        opendais 12y ago
        > In 1971 the US ended the Bretton Woods system, finally freeing the dollar from any pegging. (Thanks for the wrong hint) Eh? You were complaining about inflation not foreign exchange rates. For reference you said: > In this sense, taxes are higher now, since the dollar was pegged to gold then. http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/ http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-in... http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=1917&year2=1918 http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=1917&ye... You can verify the #s there too, cept by year to give you an idea. 1917-1918? 18% inflation Let me point out a few lines for you: 1917 12.5 15.4 14.3 18.9 19.6 20.4 18.5 19.3 19.8 19.5 17.4 18.1 17.4 1918 19.7 17.5 16.7 12.7 13.3 13.1 18.0 18.5 18.0 18.5 20.7 20.4 18.0 1919 17.9 14.9 17.1 17.6 16.6 15.0 15.2 14.9 13.4 13.1 13.5 14.5 14.6 1934 2.3 4.7 5.6 5.6 5.6 5.5 2.3 1.5 3.0 2.3 2.3 1.5 3.1 1935 3.0 3.0 3.0 3.8 3.8 2.2 2.2 2.2 0.7 1.5 2.2 3.0 2.2 Bretton Woods was for handling international exchange rates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Fixed_exchange_rates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Fixed_exch... Do you get it now? Or are you confusing the rate for gold for the rate for real goods [e.g. Food, Housing, Labor] still?
- notahacker 12y ago
  Taxes also make people have education and not die of preventable diseases, and fund a rule of law and property enforcement which plays a huge role in enabling companies to actually sell the products their customers value. All of these have certainly benefited Amazon and Google (and their shareholders, and their end users) to a far greater degree than the minimal amount of tax they deign to pay in my country where they have multiple offices and generate huge revenues. Tax avoidance, one might say, makes everyone else's taxes more expensive and subsidises monopolies.
- grecy 12y ago
  > And how do they increase their profits? By providing goods and services that customers want. Or by not paying taxes, thus lowering their expenses. > Why do you say "profits" as if it's a bad thing? Because they're making billions in private profit, at the expense of public good. Public education, healthcare, roads, infrastructure are all severely bad in America. There is a reason for that. > taxes make goods more expensive That's not the entire story. Keeping high profit margins makes goods more expensive. I'm quite certain Amazon, Google or Apple could all drop a couple of zeros from their yearly profit, pay their taxes and the goods would not increase in price. Their profit would still be very large.
  - innguest 12y ago
    What ethics do you have that makes you insist on trying to regulate the behavior of others? What is the philosophy behind it, and how do you deduce that we can achieve peace and prosperity by forcing others to do the will of a small group in power? Who gives anyone the right to steal from Google? I'm not on board with that. There's a reason companies leave the US and it's because it has the highest corporate tax in the world at 35%. Google does not live in the US. It does not owe anything to public education, healthcare, roads or infrastructure. Google is a company that allows me to search on the internet. They get paid to show me ads. I could go on and on about what they are and the topic of "roads" would never figure. If you want to argue that the founders or the employees of Google need to care about education, healthcare, roads, that's another topic, but I'm talking specifically about corporate tax. How is Google making billions at the expense of public good? How much do they owe the public, exactly? Is Google forever indentured to the State? Will it never be free? Are you OK with never being free? I would say Google has provided plenty of goods to the public and it has paid more than its share several times over. We're all better off because it exists, and the service they provide is even free. It's free and you want to make it more expensive. It's almost as if you're angry at how much money they're making. "Keeping high profit margins" is exactly what anyone would do because as human beings we want to feel safe, and high profit margins provide the safety that you will have enough resources to change your course of action if necessary, adapting to new market conditions and consumer demands. You want to erode that safety buffer and make Google more fragile. Your wording says it all: "Google [..] could [...] drop a couple of zeros from their [...] profit". The profits are their reward for supplying something we all want. We all use it daily, it's free, it's amazing and they keep making more cool stuff, and because of that the market has rewarded them. And you're advocating stealing their reward to fix roads. But we don't even know if people want roads! They're there so that's why people use them, but who's to say we don't want something better? Well, we'll never know, because the State said "roads it is" and they're sticking to it, even when the upkeep gets harder and harder. Is the State looking into alternatives to roads? No? We went through a bunch of search companies like AltaVista and Lycos and so on and it took all this time to realize Google was what we wanted, and we've rewarded them for that. What is the State doing to foster a bunch of alternative ways of transportation in order to pick the best so we can reward it? Oh, you mean you just want roads period, and you want to force everyone to pay for this product, and you don't think there could be alternatives so that's why you're not looking into competing ideas? So let's force Google to pay for this product that was artificially designed and not evolved from market forces like Google's product were? And Google should pay up because it has so much money and it would still be profitable if it sacrificed a few zeroes? Can you please justify this line of thinking to me ethically? Here we have two organizations, one puts out a crummy product it can't maintain, and the other puts out a good product that people said they would pay for; and you're saying we should take money from the successful product and use it to build more of the unsuccessful product. Do you see what I see? Because from here it's clear the solution would be for the State to simply stop making crummy products and stop stealing from successful products, but somehow we've escalated this problem all the way to the level of global corporate taxes.

bitJericho 12y ago

Amazon and Google are in fact direct competitors in a number of areas. There's also all kinds of competitors. Ebay, Barnes & Noble, MS, Yahoo, etc. It's about time companies start paying their fair share of taxes. Not only that, it's about time to start raising their tax rates since they don't care about paying employees a living wage.

ars 12y ago
> It's about time companies start paying their fair share of taxes. Why should companies even pay tax in the first place? The owners should pay tax on profits, but why should the corporation itself pay tax? > Not only that, it's about time to start raising their tax rates since they don't care about paying employees a living wage. How can you possibly not realize that if you increase their tax burden they will lower salaries? Do you think there is a magic pot of money that corporations can draw from to pay the tax?
- bitJericho 12y ago
  > Do you think there is a magic pot of money that corporations can draw from to pay the tax? Yes it's called the CEO's 30,000x higher salary. > Why should companies even pay tax in the first place? The owners should pay tax on profits, but why should the corporation itself pay tax? Because a corporation's losses cannot harm the owner's personal wealth. A corporation therefore should pay taxes in order to cover that particular expense to society.
  - ars 12y ago
    > Yes it's called the CEO's 30,000x higher salary. That wouldn't work. The CEO would just go to another company, and it's REALLY hard to find good CEO - there's a reason they are paid so much. Also, with the kinds of companies affected by this the CEO doesn't get paid at all. The owner only earns any profits, but draws no separate salary. > Because a corporation's losses cannot harm the owner's personal wealth. That's a surprisingly good answer.