Re:Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in...
by AlexTWithBeard on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @02:00PM
(#19098445)
Individuals pay taxes on income as well.
Professional expenses are usually deductible, but most of W2 people (including myself) don't have too much to deduct.
Re:Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in...
by andrewla on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @02:24PM
(#19098778)
I guess I should have said "businesses pay taxes on profit" instead of "income". Any expenditures that can be reasonably said to work towards the operation of the business are deductible. For individuals that is clearly not the case; things like paying for food to eat, rent, medical expenses (generally), or purchases of cars, etc., are explicitly excluded.
The differences are significant enough that any sort of parallel like this does not hold a lot of value. Yes, it might make sense to disallow this for corporations, but the justification seems reasonable -- it's not a loophole that allows corporations to take home huge amounts of money without paying taxes, it just allows them to deal with time horizons longer than one year. As it is, a gain in the second half of the first month of the year can be offset by a loss in the first half of the first month of the year, just because of reporting frequency.