Amazon's Tax Bill Plunges 87% After Tax Cuts (politico.com) 116
An anonymous reader shares a report: Republicans' tax cuts shaved billions off Amazon's tax bill, new government filings show. The company says it ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year, down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45% to nearly $90 billion.
That's largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beautiful Bill, something that's particularly important to Amazon which -- in addition to maintaining a vast infrastructure for its ubiquitous delivery business -- has been spending billions to build out artificial intelligence data centers.
Also helping, though less important: The law's expanded breaks for businesses research and development expenses. The company has long been criticized by Democrats for paying little in tax, and it appeared to be bracing for criticism in the wake of the report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
That's largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beautiful Bill, something that's particularly important to Amazon which -- in addition to maintaining a vast infrastructure for its ubiquitous delivery business -- has been spending billions to build out artificial intelligence data centers.
Also helping, though less important: The law's expanded breaks for businesses research and development expenses. The company has long been criticized by Democrats for paying little in tax, and it appeared to be bracing for criticism in the wake of the report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Sovereign debt? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wasn't the debt a big concern a year ago or have tariffs reduced it as promised?
Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? (Score:2)
Take your pick:
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
"If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed."
"Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen."
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Wasn't the debt a big concern a year ago
Yes - and it still is.
have tariffs reduced it as promised?
Yes - a couple hundred billion of new revenue in one year isn’t chump change.
That's funny (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure he has also personally replied to the dozens and dozens of people on the internet who have made posts talking about how they're going to die from lack of medical care after the big beautiful Bill eliminated their health care insurance.
Re:That's funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Yu need to butter up the rapist before you get these cuts.
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Re: That's funny (Score:2)
Yeah but not everyone has a young daughter to do that with
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True.
Here is an idea: Maybe ICE could grab a few of those and sell them to interested parties? That would be right up their alley.
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I don't know how to respond. I truely don't.
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Good. For many people the path to actual insight starts with a situation they cannot deal with. Sadly, many more will just dig in and create a hallucination they then start to fervently believe instead of trying to see what is real.
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Someone with a few mil to spare might want to think about it if they need a big tax break. I just want 10% of the tax break you get as a royalty.
Re:That's funny (Score:4, Informative)
Do what that guy in the UAE did (Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, national security advisor and UAE President's brother), buy a $500 million stake in Trump's crypto company (World Liberty Financial). With that kind of payola you could easily call the President whenever you wanted!
Just depreciating in one year rather than five? (Score:1)
My tax bill didn't drop 87%
From the summary: "That's largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks"
Did you buy stuff for your home business? It looks like the tax break is the one where instead of depreciating something a business (home or international conglomerate) buys over a number of years, they get to depreciate it all in the first year.
For example is my home business I got to take such a deduction for a computer, a display, and a really good chair. I bought more than that but those are the things over the dolla
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How many data centers did you build? How many warehouses?
Tax breaks for capital equipment depreciation are not new, R&D expenditures are often deductible too. I had to visit the senior bean counter more than once to find out if something was capital (therefore depreciated) or expense.
The new $1.6 billion dollar plant that was built in 2009 got tax breaks. The $12 million dollar pilot plant that was built for the next generation reactors (chemical not nuclear) was also depreciated as per schedule and cou
Re: That's funny (Score:2)
It's just hard to see how the US will balance the budget without a lot of it coming from the people with the most money. Trump just cut government income by over a billion while going a lousy job of removing anything that won't get reinstated after a lawsuit.
Re: That's funny (Score:3, Interesting)
My tax bill didn't drop 87%. I should probably pick up the phone and call Donald Trump and ask him about it. I'm sure he'll be happy to answer the phone and talk to me right? Right?
Really? You do a lot of infrastructure building? Spend most of your income on Research & Development work? See, because that's where these 'dramatic' cuts are. What you most likely actually did benefit from from was the increased standard deduction Trump implemented in his first term and Biden left in-place, but once Trump took office Democrats wanted to reduce it for all tax payers...
I'm sure he has also personally replied to the dozens and dozens of people on the internet who have made posts talking about how they're going to die from lack of medical care after the big beautiful Bill eliminated their health care insurance.
You mean Trump is a bad person for letting the Temporary, Supplemental enhanced COVID subsidies to end EXACTLY when Demo
Re: That's funny (Score:3)
These companies don't build infrastructure either! Have you heard about electricity bills going up recently?
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But I'm not sure, are you really advocating that we should just let the people in the income gap between medicaid and can afford insurance ,die? You may be on medicare now and don't care, I don't know. Oddly, once you cross 65, somehow the consensus is you made it, so affordable health insurance for you.
I was self employed for many years and can say, as yo
Re: That's funny (Score:5, Informative)
Uhm, you clearly missed the point of his sarcastic statement. He is not really saying he wanted the tax break. He was saying that they should not get the tax break they did.
You did a great job of listing the ways Amazon got the tax break and talked about how his own tax breaks went away. You did nothing at all to justify those tax breaks. You clearly thought they were obviously good ideas, when no they were not.
So to clarify:
1) Trump is a bad person for giving tax breaks to a company in exchange for things they already wanted and were going to do anyway. They would have done their OWN infrastructure building with or without the tax break. These were not roads for other citizens, it was building data centers for their own use. Similarly, they needed the research and development more than the country did. We are paying them massive tax breaks for things that benefit them and no one else. Hey - can I get a massive 82% tax break for building my own home? It's infrastructure!
2) Those people that lost medicare coverage WERE eligible for them. He did not increase investigation - he changed the eligibility rules. Specifically, if a Haitian refuge over 65 years old had worked in the US for at least 10 years - paying taxes - they would not get Medicare. He also made it harder to access programs without changing eligibility (MSPS) because poor people definitely are very good at navigating bureaucracy.
His snark was fairly easy to decode for everyone else but you.
I also don't get billions in government subsidies (Score:2)
Oh there is one exception. He was fired from PayPal for rank incompetence and because he was clevel instead of a small severance package he got a golden parachute of several million dollars. Again though he only got that because of his daddy's connections.
I'm sick and fucking tired of Rich assholes stealing my taxpayer money every whic
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You need to invest more money into your business then. Amazon was allowed to deduct all of their investment losses NOW instead of being forced to deduct them in piecemeal over years. That tax structure was a government scam to begin with.
Amazon is literally putting their money into the economy instead of giving it to the government. I don't know why people would be upset over this.
Tesla paid nothing. (Score:1)
According to this [itep.org].
So... (Score:1, Troll)
I guess we're not going to talk about the billions in tax breaks Democrat-leaning areas gave to Amazon, then?
Just to be clear: both sides routinely do this, and it's wrong when they both do it. But if you're going to complain about taxes, at least discuss the full picture.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I for one don't have a problem with this. I give uncle Jeff a lot of money each year and I prefer he doesn't spend it frivolously in another country. Americans are pretty rich as it is, they don't need more money.
Now, ideally, uncle Jeff should pay his share of taxes in my country, but he's a greedy foreigner who manipulates public opinion and undercuts local businesses, so it's a work in progress.
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Multi-national corporations by their very nature spend the money you give them (revenue) on other countries.
Globalization happened. Deal with it. No way to turn back the clock, we certainly can't go back to Second Industrial Revolution and even going back to the Third Industrial Revolution is going to destroy the US's position in world finance and make us all poorer. But the Jeff Bezos of the world will still be rich in that scenario.
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
Whether we all become poorer is irrelevant, what is bad is if some are much richer than others. Wealth is relative, not absolute. In some places, excessively rich people are rightly targeted. In some places, they remain protected.
What a coincidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon gets its tax bill reduced by almost 90% while at the same time it produces a schlock film about an illegal immigrant who used chain migration to get their parents into the country.
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Thanks for the tip! I reported them to ICE.
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Thanks for the tip! I reported them to ICE.
Amazon or Melania?
CONSUME (Score:5, Funny)
I'd boycott but I need same day delivery too much.
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Meanwhile (Score:3)
Everything costs more due to tariffs. Please stop the winning!
Re: Meanwhile (Score:3)
The tariff pung ping games have driven investment out of the US. VW for example has reduced investment here and diverted it to China, because at least in China they know what the investment environment will be like a week from now.
Melania (film) (Score:3)
The best government... (Score:3)
...money can buy! ...a shitty vanity film for his wife can buy!
The headline should read.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Better than a hundred to one!
Endgame (Score:2)
Well of course (Score:2)
It's good to be a well-funded sycophant of the king.
Off topic (Score:2)
It's like billions of dollars worth of good.
Pretty decent ROI for Amazon (Score:2)
I'm surprised to learn Amazon pays any taxes at all, so TIL they pay something; that's not nothing! Doing some quick maths here: Amazon put USD ~106 Mn (source: The Guardian) into the Melania movie, and their taxes were cut by USD 7.8 Bn. The Return On Investment is ~74 000 %. Not bad!
What problem are we solving, really? (Score:2)
There is a famous quote from early last century where a Supreme Court judge observed that he did not mind paying taxes because that is how we buy civilization. The money to pay for war, welfare and education has to come from somewhere. And if the superrich are given a free ride then it is the working poor (the rest of us) that are told to sacrifice to pay for bombing Iran... or Minneapolis. That everything seems to be falling apart from neglect and chronic underfunding should underscore the problems of let
Re:What problem are we solving, really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Workers income tax should be same as companies (Score:4, Interesting)
If a corporate pays 2% tax, then the workers income tax should be 2%
Workers should never pay more % tax than the corporate.
Or the company tax should be >= of what workers pay in income tax.
Need to have a maximum tax break (Score:3)
One of my teachers in grade school gave unlimited extra credit if we read books and took a test, so me and a classmate figured out that if we only read books we would not have to do any assignments. When it came to grading the teacher was surprised that it grades went from a D to an A. The teacher should have capped the extra credit if their intent was for us to do their assignments.
We also need a cap for tax breaks. But the bigger problem is the lobbying, the tax structures don't get setup by accident.
Re:This also helps my business (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like it's fashionable to justify anything because it "helps" small businesses.
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Sure, amd using scare quotes doesn't make something a bad idea. It only implies you don't have a real argument.
Re:This also helps my business (Score:5, Insightful)
surely there are ways to help "small business" however the GOP defines such without also giving a luscious handj...er, handshake to companies that have never paid their fair share
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LOL. So you think Amazon lowered the prices with those billions in extra revenue. ROFLMAO.
You need to be a shareholder. Consumers pay all the taxes. Shareholders benefit from all the tax breaks.
Re: This also helps my business (Score:2)
So you do admit they won't pass on any savings to you. They will split it between growing their business or giving it to investors, the only thing that makes sense. So it's one way, right? Taxes go up and they cut you deeper, taxes go down and they squeeze more juice. There's no upside. There's nothing for you to celebrate.
And you have to tax them or you can't use tax incentives to steer them the way you want like buying American, creating jobs not robots, whatever. Same thing you do with individual income
Re: This also helps my business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: This also helps my business (Score:2)
They can pass them on to their customers.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or if you really think this happened in the real world.
Re: This also helps my business (Score:3)
Consumers pass on their tax burden by spending less, you should fucking know.
It's a cycle, that's how the economy works, dipshit. All incomes should be tapped. Then tax incentives can be used to encourage behavior that benefits economic growth and social stability.
OFC some rich fucks want the tax burden moved entirely to personal income taxes, they get better effective tax rates there, it's pretty obvious what the play is.
Re: This also helps my business (Score:2)
I love the poorly educated
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I love trickle down economics (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this some dry satire or something? Isn't Amazon responsible for destroying small and local businesses with it's aggressive pricing policies and sellers fees? Didn't we witness the destruction of brick and mortar stores at the hands of Amazon just two decades prior?
Re: I love trickle down economics (Score:2)
No, that was Walmart, Target and Kroger in the 70s and 80s, Amazon didn't even start selling books online until 1996.
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No that was happening well before Amazon.
Covid had a much larger impact. I'd blame the ones who forced small businesses to close unless they were deemed essential. Where do you think people went instead? Not only did it literally force businesses to close, but people also got used to the convenience of online shopping with 1-2 day delivery.
Re: This also helps my business (Score:2)
Small businesses get the exact same depreciation and R&D expense tax breaks as Amazon, but the numbers involved are proportionally smaller...
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compete with Amazon? good luck
Re: This also helps my business (Score:5, Funny)
That's awesome, and it helps Amazon more. One of the last companies on the planet that needed a leg up. May their investments trickle upon you.
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I am all for Amazon keeping the money they earned rather than turning it over to the government.
The government shutdown for like thirty something days last year and I would not have known if I did not turn on the news.
Hypocrite.
You're posting from America, no the Libertarian Paradise of the Congo. You live somewhere that there is a strong government running the country then make-believe that the government doesn't matter.
Re:This also helps my business (Score:4, Interesting)
The libertarian paradise of the Congo doesn't have much of a government, neither does Haiti.
Of you want government strong enough to not simply be government of the local warlord then you need a government, paid for by taxes etc etc etc.
What I want is a federal government that is not wasteful (not tossing my money to corrupt social programs), defends me
You contradict yourself. Social programs are a cheaper way to deal with most problems than the police, prisons and justice system.
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The libertarian paradise of the Congo doesn't have much of a government, neither does Haiti.
You can keep propping up your strawman and knocking him down, but it all screams you have no argument.
Of you want government strong enough to not simply be government of the local warlord then you need a government, paid for by taxes etc etc etc.
Reducing the United States federal government's budget by 87% does not have to weaken its ability to repel enemy invasion and help United States citizens defend their rights against local governments and interstate criminals. No one has said completely defund the government. My argument is that it is full of waste. An argument you refuse to address because then you have defend spending on DHS to round up pe
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You'll find the "Low taxes, vague views about what government should do which mostly revolve around violence against other people" thing is a popular thing in the US among that subset that also consistently votes for right wing parties. Now, I know what you're about to say, "It's because they're secretly fascists", but it's more complex than that. You see, fascists and the kinds of people who think social programs aren't valuable and that healthcare can be done by the free market, and so on, have one major
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Good luck paving your own roads then.
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I do enjoy playing with asphalt and concrete, but they are not my specialty.
In the few miles are so around me my property taxes pay for the roads.
In the tens of miles around me the toll ways are the best highways and paid for by tolls.
Now interstates are great, and I would say put tolls on them to pay for them.
See, then Amazon trucks would pay tolls for use, and I can pay Amazon who can use the money to pay tolls.
Then Amazon and I are not paying for stolen social services for fake day cares and wanna be ter
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You didn't notice the shutdown because the government forced essential workers to work for free. But I guess slavery is fine with you as long as corporations get their cut.
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So you admit the federal government enslaves people, and yet you want to make sure they get "their cut" to continue their slave trade?
Now we know the federal government is pretty evil, using force "legally" to enslave (prisoners) and steal (taxes) and murder.
However, essential workers are not slaves. They knew, or now know, the job requires them to show up even when there is no pay.
They can quit, slaves cannot just quit. Sure there are consequences if you quit, but it is not force keeping you there like a r
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Compete until Amazon decides to enter your business sector, then you go bust or get bought.
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I know it's fashionable to hate on big corporations, but those depreciation changes are helping tens of thousands of small businesses compete.
This is not an accident. Lobbyist and politicians know how to wrap unpalatable laws in appealing packages. Yes, small businesses did get a tax benefit of around $80-90 billions from OBBB, but large corporations got around $300 billion. This tax reduction allows the big corporations to do what they need to do ... i.e., lay off workers.
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