The article states that the options expense of $917 million is one of the deductions, that would only account for ~16% of their 2017 earnings ($5.6 billion) and something like ⅓ of that in taxes, so not anywhere near 100% of their taxes are involved.

Do you think allowing companies to treat compensation as an expense is a bad thing? The employees will be taxed on the value they receive by exercising the options and will generally be in higher brackets, so the big impact of the exercises is that the employees end up with something like $600 million (the government gets a big chunk either way).

This happens any time a company’s pays its employees. The only difference here is that the payment is in equity instead of cash. It’s really not notable.

This isn't exactly new, though. Incidence of corporate taxes - not just Amazon - is already well-understood to primarily fall on labor.

https://www.kansascityfed.org/Publicat/RegionalRWP/RRWP07-01...

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/tax-anal...

I want to believe in this hypothesis, because the case for land taxes has long been rejected due to the perception that they unfairly penalise 'mom and pop'. If corporate taxes do end up simply being a tax on labour, then taxes that don't have the same potential for manipulation can be put in their place.

However, two PDFs alone isn't sufficient proof for me. Has a broad meta-study of both sides of the argument been done?

It’s outrageous.

Possibly there is a case that corps should pay zero income tax and workers should bear the entire burden, but I’ve never heard a convincing argument. This, corps create wealth argument, and CNBC corporatist babble is pretty unconvincing.

Given inherent advantages of capital over labor, and the fact corps enjoy special privlidges provided by the US Govt, why should their fair share of the burden be paid by workers and their grandchildren’s future of US $20T debt interest payments?

I can’t tell if that’s sarcasm or someone baited a line with this garbage and you just swallowed it whole.

Would it make you happier if corporations paid their 35% tax rate before paying their employees? That would leave 35% less money to pay them with.

The irony of that is most employees pay less than the corporate rate, so they would get less!

You’re proposing workers get paid less just so the corporations directly pay taxes.

That’s insane. Your own policies would hurt the very workers you purport to aid.

Its not like you pay your employees OR pay your taxes. Nor cut the workforce unless you get zero taxes.

Tax increase can slow growth but because there’s less spending, but the big tech cos are stockpiling their profits anyway.

I’m no socialist by any means, but anyone who thinks 0% taxes on 700 billion mega-co is fair.

Unless those people are Amazon shareholders, it the worst case of Stockholm syndrome anyone’s ever seen!

And US corps never paid 35%. They paid on average 12-19%.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52419#section3 http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/01/news/economy/corporate-tax-r...

Ok, you wholly own and operate a C Corp. To keep it simple, it only has two employees, you and Jack.

Your business has negligible expenses and has revenues of 150k this year.

From that, you pay yourself 100k to run the business and Jack gets paid 40k.

Congrats. You made 10k of operating income. What are your options?

1- Take the income as profit, pay tax on it @ 35% and retain the earnings left over.

2- Do the above, but issue a dividend to yourself for $7.5k, and pay 20% tax on that income on your personal return leaving only 6K.

3- Bonus the money to Jack. It’s tax deductible for the business, so now your EVIL corporation pays $0 in taxes! Jack gets a boost and pays almost no taxes on the 10K because of his income level.

I never said you pay taxes or employees.

Either pay more in taxes and pay employees less OR pay less in taxes and pay employees more.

Correction: you could do both by losing money every year. I’d hate to see your company’s financials though.

Effective tax rates are meaningless as a sign of total tax burden and can mean multiple things.