| Baalzamon said: And if you know absolutely nothing about taxes, you shouldn't complain about businesses paying no taxes when the inherent cause is generally carry forward losses. It's really a pretty simple concept, but many people struggle to grasp it (as they only look at current numbers). If Amazon lost $10B in 2015 (fictitious number), and then makes $2.5B in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. They've made in total $0 (therefore should pay $0 in taxes or else they would be getting punished by the government for not even making an overall profit). They, however, will pay $0 in taxes in 2016-2019. They don't receive a gigantic refund from the federal government for losing $10B in 2015. Instead they get to carry these losses forward to offset gains in future years. It overall nets to where the company only pays taxes on true total cumulative income. The news articles etc that want to completely misinform the population generally fail to explain this concept to people (which is a concept that makes perfect sense). Amazon hasn't cheated on their taxes at all. They've simply followed the tax law as it was appropriately written. |
Pretty sure I remember hearing in a YouTube vid about Amazon that it hasn't actually made money until recently, which is why they haven't been paying taxes. I personally don't know how you legitimately say that a businessman is rich if they don't fully own their own business and are out of debt. Living off of other people's money is welfare.
Below, I'm not taking into account the fewer rich and elite who've been handed down massive amounts of money, or lucky people who win's lotteries, etc. However, even if these wealthy people aren't doing much with the wealth, odds are part of their parents goal was to pass it down to them, which is part of the reason why they worked to acquire it in the first place, so.
As for the capitalism vs socialism talk about money, there's no solid answer. If you take or cap some of the rich's money, that only lasts for a while before it becomes normalized, and then it will be time to take even more. No different than how it's never enough for some of those businessman. Once they have a lot, it's ok for a while, but then they want even more.
The reason why you don't want to interfere too much with the rich is because you can very well screw yourself over with socialism. If you take too much from a businessman, some will pack up their business and leave, taking it to another country who will allow them to continue as they were for the most part. Just look at what China is doing specifically for Tesla right now. Many countries would kill to have some former American businesses headquartered there.
If those big businesses leave, there goes those taxes, and even worse, those businesses now have great products that are likely much cheaper now, so your countries people still buy them, sending their money out of the country even more so. While some of the medium size businesses will grow and make up for some of the losses, many will not since there won't be the drive to do so. Why try and grow, if most of that profit is taken away and given to everyone else? Why try and grow if you can never stand a chance of catching the companies that left?
It's also known that in companies, a small amount of the most efficient employee's, do a lot more than their far share of the work, and it isn't linear as a company grows. The bigger the company is, the smaller the percentage of people doing more than their fair share. There's a name for this but I forget it.
For many of the businesses and best employees that stay, they slowly start to give up. Why physically work harder, think harder, have more patience and make better decisions, if you're not worth much more, if at all, than your coworkers? This leads to production and efficiency dropping considerably, so less money being made by those companies to be taxed.
There are also the employee's who spend their time just getting by at work, doing just enough to keep their job but nothing more. There's no doubt when the top employee's start slacking off due to more equal pay, those typical slackers, will try to slack even more and maintain the employee performance gap. They got away with it this entire time, why should anything change now?
One way or another it leads to everyone being more financially equal, but equally poor. The other way around with capitalism, over time, is for some to be poor, some to be lower middle class, some to be upper middle class, some to be rich, and some to be elite. The thing is that the poor in a capitalist system end up much better off then the poor in a socialist system, so it's hard to deny which is the more welcome outcome. Obviously nobody being poor would be great, but the world doesn't work like that unfortunately. Strong animals thrive, while they watch others starve. Life is complicated and tough.
