Re:Netflix paid just 1.1 percent in Federal Tax
by tlss on Thursday February 03, 2022 @05:12PM
(#30199750)
Businesses get preferential tax treatment because we want to encourage risk-taking. Yes, focusing on a handful of hyper-successful businesses make it seem like things are "not fair", but that's neglecting the much higher likelihood of businesses failing vs. a payroll employee getting fired. In most cases, even if an employee is fired, there are still labour law protections, social security, severance packages, and the employee has right to sue. When businesses fail, they fail.
If you want to get preferential tax treatment, go start a business! Go take risks, hire people, make money, pay other businesses, this is how capitalism works! If you can make it, by all means enjoy your tax deductions.
What can make this system dysfunctional is when you have corruption and cronyism that unfairly disadvantages some businesses vs. others. For example special access to loans, bailouts, or special tax deductions for meeting esoteric criteria. But this would a corruption problem IMO, rather than an inherent unfairness in the tax scheme.
>Because you don't employ people. From a taxation perspective it's much better to have companies running on quite low margins that allows them to keep existing. It's why some companies get subsidies so even though they are barely profitable, their employees, the voters, can stay happy.
All* of Netflix's income comes from subscribers who are ordinary people. Ordinary people are the reason why Netflix exists. Why don't we subsidize ordinary people to ensure their happiness?
*(or at least most, for this discussion at least, I'm not familiar with all of Netflix' income streams)
> Netflix will have X engineers at +$300k/year paying taxes, injects money in the TV/movie industry with their productions and is overall a positive for the economy.
Again, all of that money flows from ordinary people, Netflix is just the conduit. People inject money to the industry via Netflix. Point is, it's all a matter of perspective and line drawing, and every line is drawn so that large corporations benefit, not ordinary people. It's all choices that have been made, and all in favor of large corporations.
> While I don't know where you live or your financial situation, there are probably a ton of benefits/tax credits that you do in fact get to incentivize a specific behaviour (think retirement account, tax-free saving accounts, etc...)
But none take my overall personal tax liability down to 1.1%. There's an order of magnitude difference there. Show me one (well off, just as Netflix is) W2 employee who has ever legally reduced their tax liability down to 1.1%.