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Tax Peculiarities Mean Facebook Paid No Net Taxes For 2012
Frosty Piss writes "Despite earning more than $1 billion in profits last year, social media juggernaut Facebook paid zilch when it came to federal and state taxes in 2012. In fact, the website will actually be getting a refund totaling $429 million thanks to a tax reduction for executive stock options. In the coming years, Facebook will continue to get monster tax breaks, totaling about $3 billion. 'The employees cash in stock options, and at that point there is tax deduction for the company,' Robert McIntyre, of watchdog group Citizens for Tax Justice, said. 'Because even though it doesn't cost Facebook a nickel, the government treats it as wages and they get a deduction for it.'" (That's not to say that Facebook employees' salaries didn't get taxed.)
This is normal - the rich don't pay tax.
Korma: Good
... would mean that there are less things which need cutting from the federal budget.
... wait, what?
"Facebook didn't immediately respond to an emailed request for comment, according to The Huffington Post."
While I agree with the article's premise, this just seems incredibly lazy to me. Heck, e-mail isn't even meant for immediate responses!
Whenever such stories pop up I wonder how much it would cost your average worker to get the same effect.
How big is the overhead for setting up a few shell companies to outsource your job to yourself and move your contracor fee (formally known as salary) to Ireland and back into a non-profit with the sole profit of providing for you?
Of course when you do it as an indivual, it's tax fraud, but where's the point where it turns into SOP? Can you get together with a thousand people, set up a bogus company, Random Stuff Inc., everybody still does their old job but you all pay zero taxes? Ten thousand?
Capitalism's a joke XD
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Don't worry, this is perfectly fine. If we taxed Facebook, they would just pass the taxes along to us in the form of higher prices!
....
Right?
How much do you pay for your Facebook account again?
The article should be: "Clueless lawmakers who have never done and honest day's work and are clueless as to how businesses actually operate wrote laws so bad and full of holes that Facebook posts billions in profits and payed zero taxes."
Please. Quit blaming the companies. They do exactly what they are supposed to do. It is 100% the fault of the lawmakers.
When you see wind farm tax breaks, do you get upset about wind power generation companies taking advantage of tax laws? All companies try to take advantage of all tax breaks. That is the way the world works. It is a fundamental truth. The tax code is somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000+ pages. Larger companies have larger budgets for tax planning and have a greater ability to take advantage of tax breaks.
Simplify the tax code. Life for everyone will become easier. You'll put 100,000 tax consultants out of work. Perhaps they will go off and build something instead of making lots of money helping companies minimize taxes.
When corporations keep record profits internally and pay their people minimum wage, we scream that it's not fair and they need to pay their employees more. When they pay no taxes because they paid their employees with large stock options, they aren't paying their fair share, even though the marginal rate for employees is typically higher than the tax rate of a corporation. And contrary to the implications of the article, stock options do cost the company something, they cost the company the future ability to use those shares of the company to raise investor funds.
This all said, I do agree there's an inherent unfairness to small businesses who can't easily utilize international laws to move profits to a location where corporate income isn't taxed. But unless you're trying to move more business out of the US, I don't agree that the right answer is to force companies to pay taxes on foreign income. Rather, we should be doing more to eliminate red tape and other barriers to entry faced by people that want to start a company and hire people.
Good! Starve that bureaucratic beast! The more companies do this, the better.
This is normal, only in places where capitalism has gone wrong.
Yes, also where I live.
The lobbying powers of whatever entity have to killed entirely.
The government needs to serve the people and nobody else.
And companies are not people.
The correct behavior is to "design" your company's taxation so that you are paying the highest amount of taxes. That would be holy and pure behavior.
This, instead, is detestable and bad behavior.
Guess what THAT means folks - YOU, as homeowners, take up the slack instead!
* Makes sense - as politicians in the US are TRULY "the best money can REALLY buy"...
(They don't even WRITE THE BILLS THEY ATTEMPT TO PASS INTO LAW @ the obvious behest of their paymasters in "KORPORATE AMERIKA"...)
They're just in cahoots with one another & this makes it painfully obvious - yes, welcome to the world in 2013 people, lol!
APK
P.S.=> Stuff like this happening ordinarily would be unbelievable, especially that people ALLOW it to go on based on the very 1st sentence I typed above - By allowing it folks are letting them get away with what I feel equates to robbery in fact!
... apk
Yes, I said it, "Fuck Facebook!" Here is my off-topic rant: It is a giant waste of time contributing to the dumbing down of America and the loss of meaningful communication skills. And now, Facebook contributes nothing back by not paying any taxes!? I wish people would leave that site en masse and send it crashing down. Okay, rant over.
Well, it's fiscal stimulus isn't it? Growth is the increase in money supply, if Facebook is making money, even if its funny money subsidies from the government, it's still an increase in money supply. It still shows up as growth. It still makes the dollar look good.
So a lot of employees at Facebook get the money? They've turned something that was worthless (your private data) into something worth $1 billion pinky-in-mouth dollars! Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of blokes.
Would you rather money was funneled into Facebook by these dodgy tax arrangements or the military industrial complex who usually get it?
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This just hit the news here in Europe:
Britain, France and Germany back multinational tax clampdown
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/02/16/uk-g20-russia-tax-idUKBRE91F00V20130216
(Reuters) - The British, French and German governments launched a joint initiative on Saturday to crack down on tax avoidance by multinational companies that will be presented to a G20 finance leaders meeting in July.
I hope it's not all talk....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The government actually gets MORE in tax revenue.
Consider that if there are $1B in RSUs converted from being RSUs into normal income for employees, that's $1B of employee income that gets taxed at the ordinary income tax rate, rather than $1B of corporate profits being taxed at the (much lower) corporate tax rate.
So instead of 15% of $1B, the taxes collected go up to 28% of $1B.
The reason this ends up paid by the employee instead of the company is because of the FAS rules that the government has established that incentivize RSUs in place of non-qualifying stock options.
One up side for the employee is that they realize a lower basis price for their stock (the pice at time of grant of the RSU, rather than time of exercise of an option), and it gets held as a long term capital gain instead of a short term, so it's "only" 28% instead of 35%. The employee could do this themselves with stock options by exercising early in the new year, and then the next year, selling all or part as long term gains between the previous years date of exercise and April 15th in order to pay the previous year's tax burden.
A second upside for the employee is that, even though they are being taxed at a higher effective rate on a smaller effective gain, it pulls out the risk of something like the .bomb. In other words, it reduces their downside risk should the stock lose value.
I had a number of friends at Netscape who were left holding the bag when between the exercise and hold of stock options for tax purposes, or just because they thought the stock would increase in value, and the stock crashed, leaving them with an AMT at exercise of millions, with no money to pay the AMT because they had relatively worthless stock and no cash. One friend was looking at a $27M debt to the state of California and the Federal government, and no way to pay it. The were going to send him to prison for tax evasion, so he took some of his savings, went to a gun shop, bought a gun, and put a bullet through his head.
Needless to say, I am against the government realizing the value of an asset until the asset holder sells (i.e. AMT is a great evil and needs to go away; until I have sold a stock obtained through option or RSU, I have not gotten income, and the government shouldn't either, since I don't have money to pay the taxes on the thing until it's been sold).
Also needless to say, in the context of this article, I do not pity the government for its significant, almost double, gain in tax revenue from income tax revenue that it gets by collecting it from individuals rather than the corporation.
To hell with those licensing schemes mentioned in other posts. And, no, we will not allow any foreign taxes paid to be deducted from taxes due in the US. If you have an office in Ireland, or wherever, you pay your taxes there - and you ALSO pay your taxes here.
I don't think it would be fair to tax foreign operations, if those foreign operations generate foreign income.
Therein lies the problem. Currently, a company that generates, say, 90% of its income in America is sending, say, 90% of its profits overseas.
Here's what would be fair and equitable: For any company with an international presence, if 90% of your income is generated in America, then 90% of your net profits are taxed, regardless of where you house those profits throughout the world.
Of course, then we'll probably see companies shift their financial operations overseas, allowing them to claim that income is no longer made "in America", which wouldn't at all be a difficult shift in today's internet-based global economy. In which case we change the law once more to say that you either still pay a percent of profits or instead pay a flat tax on international income, whichever is larger. Businesses would scream holy hell, but it doesn't matter, because they're the ones that brought this on themselves. If you profit from America, you are obligated to pay America taxes so that America can continue to afford to be America.
First, when the employees cash in their stock options, they become liable for tax on the profits. The article doesn't mention that, which would only be slightly misleading, but that little comment at the end ("That's not to say that Facebook employees' salaries didn't get taxed.") implies that only their salaries got taxed, which is not true.
Second, the employee stock options did cost the company money--although there is no direct expense, that dilution of stockholder equity reduces the stock price. Not only today, but it was most certainly a factor when the IPO was priced.
Third, if they're getting a refund of $429 million, I'm pretty sure that's money that they overpaid and are getting back, whereas the summary is worded in a way to try make you think they never paid anything at all in 2012, and now the feds are handing them a check for $429 million.
Fourth, if you read the article instead of just the summary, it gets even worse. Facebook had a billion $ profit in 2012, after years of large losses which have been carried forward. This year they applied a billion of the accumulated prior losses in order to pay tax on $0. They have $3 billion in those prior losses still, so the article states that's $3 billion in taxes they won't pay, which is a bald-faced lie--that's $3 billion on which they will pay no tax, not $3 billion in taxes they won't pay.
Please. Quit blaming the politicians. They do exactly what they are supposed to do. It is 100% the fault of the VOTERS.
There, fixed that for you.
Remember the US elections, half the voters voted for a guy they THOUGHT would fix the economy BUT whose economic policies were considered so bad by the two leading economic newspapaers, they recommended people vote for the democrat who they hate with a passion but at least whose policies they might not agree with but are at least in the realms of sanity. And STILL half the voters voted for the guy who wanted to fix the economy with no plan and ideas that were completely loopy.
THAT is the reason the world is the way it is. Because voters are dumb as shit. Those that aren't just voting for their own narrow self intrests in the short term are voting because one day they might make it rich so no taxes for the rich and let the poor pay for it all regardless of how poor they are. The trailer trash republicans. Oh those poor rich guys who can barely survive on a few hundred thousands while they stand in front of their trailer with a family of 12.
THAT is the reason politics suck. Because voters have power but no accountability. We should tatoo people with their voting choice and if they voted wrong, they get culled. You voted for less regulation of the banks, well... pay your pound of fesh, we will be taking it from the neck.
Democracy was never created witht the idea of letting every lunatic have an equal vote on how the asylum should be run.
Remember that Warren Buffer is for HIGHER taxes for the rich. The rich REALLY do NOT need your sympathy or support, they got enough money that even as he himself proposes the tax rate goes to 70 percent, he will still be sitting pretty. Buffet has on more then one occasion commented on how unbalanced the system is in making the least deserving filthy fucking rich. So why not tax them to hell and back?
Why take the insane ramblings of a POLITICIAN and failed businessman (is Romney as rich as Buffet? No? Then he is a failure, why take advice from a man who is a failure in a sucky job by his own standards?) over one of the most succesful?
Because one day you to might have a million (no you won't) and you are scared to death the taxman will come and take it all away. So you pay your taxes now for the rich because one they you might be them and boy... will you be sitting pretty then.
This is not dissimilar to offering your daughter to the king, in the hope that one day you will be king and you can excersise your Droit du seigneur. The critical flaw in the logic is that you are not inline to be king. Ever.
The problem is that once you are rich, you actually need very little money. You can borrow your income, buy stuff that keeps its value. Pay yourself a tiny salary and have a company lease everything for you. Only the poor have to pay for stuff with cash they got through a salary. Or borrow with a credit card. Got enough stock? Then borrow some money against that stock, put the borrowed money into an account, collect interest and live of that.
It shouldn't be possible, but it is. Only foolish millionare lottery winners go to a Ferrari shop and drop a load of cash. Far simpler to lease the car through yourself and end up getting payed by the taxman to drive an expensive car you can sell on for more money then it originally cost in the first place.
And people with three cars on blocks on their lawn vote for this.
Democracy is letting the lunatics run the asylum.
The economic ignorance underlying this story is truly, truly astounding. Congratulations into buying into the government sponsored envy.
I suppose it doesn't hurt that Facebook engineers were on Obama's reelection "dream team", along with Google and Twitter.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/
The real problem is corporate executives with the clout to pay themselves next to nothing in cash and everything in stock and capital assets, taxed only when they choose to liquidate at their leisure. The fact that many corporations work around taxation and can, in this case, get a refund for having put their revenue back into the economy during the year, is not such an immortal sin as to consternate the general public.
I'm more concerned with big government stripping people of their right to free choice than I am with companies doing what their shareholders would demand of them.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
EIC isn't a tax benefit. It's a welfare program for people that make so little they would be homeless otherwise. Most EIC recipients are getting more than they're paying in. It's a counterweight for massive unemployment and wage suppression brought on by huge increases in productivity and lost manufacturing jobs.
Health care deductions are similar. The insane cost of health care necessitated massive subsidies in the form of tax subsidies. Companies benefit more from those subsidies then middle income earners ever will. But again, it's a form of indirect socialism meant to prevent large social upheavals.
Now take a billionaire. He's actually the poorest man on earth. That's because he claims virtually no income. Instead, he uses his connections with banks and the US Treasury (staffed almost exclusively by former employees of Goldman Sachs, google it) to get loans at below market rates (4, 3, even 2 %). He then lives off these loans until the day he dies and wills his estate out. This is how the 1% avoid taxes by and large. Everything else is nickle and dimes.
The money is moved overseas (cayman islands) not so much to avoid taxes (they've already done that), but to make sure American don't realize why the "Greatest Nation on Earth" is suddenly broke (hint: it's not welfare, food stamps 1/1000th of our deficit, let alone our budget. Again, google it). The money can't be left sitting in American Banks because it becomes too obvious where it went. Conservative estimates put the figure at 10 Trillion, could be as high as 30 Trillion. We could pay off our national debt with that, let alone our meager deficit.
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You're exactly right. You are a beacon of understanding lost in a sea of ignorance.
In years past, I often noticed the ignorance of the masses and wasted a great deal of time wondering how the better educated few were able to keep the "mobs" at bay throughout the years. I worry about this even more today. Not because I am one of the wealthy few or because I face immediately tangible losses at the hands of the mob, in fact I would likely enjoy immediate short term benefit along with the masses. But, their ignorance is not a way forward and offers no opportunity for advancement or success.
I really don't want to see us return to an age of violence where the rulers maintain control through force. But, if the mob comes together and overwhelms the system, how will we avoid plunging into a failed state of idiocracy and near anarchy?
Contrary to popular sentiment, "stealing" the money or property of others for the benefit of the masses in the name of "fairness" is not a viable solution. The world is full of failed states and third world countries where it has been repeatedly tried and demonstrated to not work, ever.
read the sec filings. 2011 was the 1 billion profit. 2012 was 53 million profit. gee it's almost like they pulled a bunch of accounting tricks to look amzing before the ipo.
the trouble with simple is it becomes too easy to stop all progress, because you only have one point of attack. Take California. They simplified things by putting a rule in place that any tax increase requires a 2/3rds majority. Simple, right? Well, the same wasn't true for a tax cut, and as a result the state is rapidly going broke. You've got a single point of failure. If you're rich and gunning for tax cuts at the expense of essential services (that you still get since you'll lobby to keep them in your area) then simplifying things gives you one place to sling your lobbying at.
Those "loopholes" do a lot of good. The EIC is a welfare program masquerading as tax cut, but without it we'd have millions more homeless (which, fyi, cost more to deal with unless you start rounding them up for forced work camps, which most Americans don't have the stomach to do). I guess what I'm saying is, be careful what your wish for...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yeah, that'd be great. If I could afford to get medical care in the first place. With under $18k/year total income, that's not going to get me a lot of remedy. My glasses no longer correct my vision in my right eye, my left eye has some kind of lump in the back that distorts what I see (and so the prescription is sort of irrelevant for my left), my knees are both shot, I have a hernia I have to wear a belly truss for, and just to top things off, I've developed a profound gluten allergy.
Can't buy insurance for all this pre-existing stuff, but hey, that doesn't matter, because I can't afford insurance anyway. But my income, that whopping 18k, disqualifies me from just about every medical program there is. Oh, they'll do me and let me rack up an enormous debt, then come after everything I've managed to put together in 50-odd years of work, if I wanted to go that way. But no, I'd like to leave some things to my kids. Which will probably happen sooner rather than later at this rate.
Of course, I pay my taxes, and I certainly don't get it all back. It's eight years until social security kicks in at the lowest rate (you're supposed to wait till you're older if you can, but...) unless they change it, all I have to do is get there from here, lol. I feel like I'm playing a really stressful video game with only one life remaining.
I've got mad programming skills, but you can just imagine the reaction of a prospective employer when I come in, limping, wrapped in a truss (not that it really keeps my guts inside where they're supposed to be... really kinda awful looking), one eye looking at 'em, one eye wandering around, late 50's. Yeah, they really want me around.
Yessir, you can just imagine how in sympathy with Facebook's little tax issues I am.
There's nothing wrong with a progressive tax code with incentives. It does a lot of good. Nobody likes taxes because nobody likes to pay for anything, so it's always in fashion to say it's just broken. All we need to do is go back to a 90% top tax bracket (don't forget, you ONLY pay that 90 % on the amount OVER a certain threshold. So a billionaire pays the same as you do), and start raising the capital gains.
I keep hearing the job creators will stop making jobs if we do this. Well, they didn't do it in the 40s and 50s when we did. They're not going to stop making money just because you tax them. Making money is all they do. They're in investor class. The ruling class. What the hell else are they going to do?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
facebook handed the keys to the facebook kingdom to government snoops and the police so they can see what everyone on facebook is doing (without a warrant). dont let the lamestream media rhetoric and govt propaganda fill your head with drivel & propaganda
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The poor, whining, inbred little crackers...
"Haven't we suffered 'nuff y'all?" they whine...
"The cracker cries out in pain as he strikes you". african american saying.
Fakebook don't pay taxes because they are crackers, and the crackers run almost the entire government, and make sure their cracker friends don't have to pay up.
Can anyone explain this from FB's Income Statement (you can read it on Yahoo! finance):
Income before tax = $494 M
Income taxes = $441M
Income after tax = $53M
First of all, it's not true to say that it costs Facebook nothing to give shares to employees redeeming stock options. Those same shares could have been sold on the open market for a lot of money and Facebook is giving that up. Also, every time an employee exercises an option and Facebook gets a tax deduction, the employee pays the government in the form of capital gains tax. Finally, it's silly to say that capital gains should be taxed the same as ordinary income because capital gains have a huge hidden tax which is capital losses -- you have to put money at risk to have a capital gain and often people end up with a capital loss instead, especially with a new business. It takes a long time to deduct a big capital loss (only $3,000 per year) unless you also have big capital gains to offset. Earned income doesn't have this risk. You get paid as you go and even if the company goes bankrupt you still get to keep the salary you were already paid. A lower capital gains tax incents people to invest, especially in new business which are more likely than not to fail.
Americans shouldn't profit off of a global company, taxes for Americans should be illegal.
A "simple measure" that happens to wreak havoc on an already convoluted tax system does not a simple tax system make. Really now, your argument sucks so much that it ought to spontaneously implode.
Let's put it into a... building analogy. I say I'd like a "simple" building, without all sorts of baroque or gothic or whatnot ornaments. And you point to the obvious and simple fact that not having doors would count as simple and that you tried it and got your furniture stolen. No sympathy from me and no, your argument is not a valid counter. Reasons why left as an exercise.
As far as I'm concerned the idea already exposed someone's complete failure to grok what it was about. And that is a good thing, for then we can do something about it.
The taxes are pushed off to the employees and it is there problem. What bothers me about income tax is when people Ike Steve Jobs got paid $1/year on the books and lived off their stock (I'll honestly admit I don't know how that works). So I'm for shifting away from just taxing income to taxing more in sales tax because the rich tend to have fine tastes.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Did anyone actually look at the 2012 10K? Particularly the statement of cash flows supplemental disclosure which shows they paid $53M in net income taxes in 2012? It may not have all (or any) been paid in the US, but they did pay taxes in 2012.
Congratulations in buying into the entitlement mentality for business.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
A "refund" regarding tax 'payment(s)' to US and State (California) means return of money that was payed that is in 'excess' of that which is owed !
Facebook Inc. payed all owed taxes.
Sigh. Yes it does cost Facebook money. If they hadn't given those stock options to their employees, they could've (A) sold the shares during their IPO and made a ton more money, or (B) not issued those shares at all meaning there were fewer overall shares, meaning each share would've been valued higher, meaning they would've made a ton more money during the IPO. Just because you don't know how to properly account for opportunity costs doesn't mean it didn't cost them a nickel.
The deduction seems to be designed to encourage companies to give shares (i.e. partial ownership) to their employees, in preference to selling on the market where "only rich people" can partake in the market and passive income dividends.
Riiiggggghhhtt, next the poster will be quoting John D. Rockefeller and Lloyd Blankfein claiming that "God gave them their money" --- geez Louise, already, please don't be so dishonest, so disingenuous to ignore that the entire tax code was designed specifically for this, endless passages and sections have been pointed out, most recently by Ellen Schultz in her recent book, Retirement Heist, going back to that dood, Gino (of Gino's Pizza) and Louis B. Mayer's incredibly fraudulent and obtuse tax code section ONLY specifically benefitting his wealth --- the reason Zuckerberg has been making those international banker forums (known as the Bilderbergers) with David Rockefeller and the other int'l master banksters, is precisely for that reason of massively accumulating wealth and paying no taxes (and using Facebook to spy and manipulate, 'natch).
Recommended reading:
Lance deHaven-Smith's Conspiracy Theory in America
"...there's an inherent unfairness to small businesses ..."
speaking of unfairness to small businesses:
http://www.rgm.com/articles/financialwire.html
In other words, hedge funds first do naked shorting of small, public companies (small businesses), and just several years ago, congress passed legislation giving special small business loan preference to "small businesses" previously invested in by hedge funds and/or private equity funds. (Can you say obvious financial fraud and monopolization pattern?)
When are people going to finally stand up for themselves and stop ridiculously wealthy CEOs from building their wealth off the backs of everyone else? I'm tired of hearing our politicians simply shift money around rather than going after the very people and companies not paying their fair share.
I don't know the US legal system nor it's taxation, however I do know the Australian system.
For comparison, if you were doing that in Australia, particularly if you described it the way you have, you would easily fall under the Income Tax Assessment Act of 1936 Part IVA--Schemes to reduce income tax. At which point they would use section 177F to remove the affects of any benefit you're creating for yourself, tax you on the new amount, and depending on the severity of the situation, there could be fines and even jail time.
The difficulty in Australia is that to figure out this can take quite a lot of time and money, however the ATO has special divisions that target the ones they will get the most gain from. One of my lecturers at university was one of the people who worked at the ATO on high net worth individuals to try and figure out if they were dodging tax. He had a lot of insight on methods used to find people who were living off of loans from corporations which they themselves controlled or owned, such that they were re-classifying their income as expenses. It's actually really interesting how they go about it.
While I know the US is very different in this regards, I'd be somewhat surprised if something like this didn't exist in the US.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Never said they didn't, it's much like how they build it for a buck & sell it for 4... pretty damned elementary, & cascades to everything AND anything they do - an obvious "modus operandi".
LOL, 401k... think THAT'll be around once you get around to collecting it (or, if you're not enough of a "rat" to mercilessly destroy others around you to "get ahead" because being comfortably wealthy, just ISN'T enough for "that kind"... no, since they're cursed with 2" peckers, they need "more" to even get LAID... lol, truth if I ever uttered it).
Think even Social Security will be? It's been ROBBED BLIND with "IOU's" that'll NEVER be repaid... when they said in the 50's & 60's "there is too much money in it, & the well will never 'go dry'" (essentially)... look @ it now, & wait till you FINALLY do get there, lol...
FOOLS believe in those things. They're no better than INDULGENCES sold by the church (you give us ALL your "Holy Dollar" & we guarantee you go to heaven with this slip of paper... even if you're a child rapist!).
LMAO - come on! EVERYTHING YOU SAID? Academic... & when reality hits home?? Don't say I didn't TELL you so.
By the way: Know ANY construction workers (union men specifically)? Know what Madoff did to them?? Same shit.
Oh, sure - NOW they're being MADE TO PAY BACK, but I saw a piece of paper on my neighbor's table he let me check out that SHOWS THEY'RE JUST DOING ANOTHER "std. modus operandi" of theirs - changing the RULES, yet again, via "paragraph 5 section 3 states that" (fine print "outs", nothing more) ripping them off, yet again!
APK
P.S.=> Above ALL else - don't even *try* to condescend to me, or "preach" my way, BOY... you don't have what it takes intellectually, experientially, or just plain have the will for it (since you're merely attempting to cut me down & failing badly, making it obvious YOU TOO are part of the "billionaire boys club" spouting your bullshit my way, & again - FAILING vs. the real world out there crumbling financially + economically in the wake of utter CRIMINALS making it happen, from the IMF on downwards)...
... apk
I already dropped a reality 'nuke' on him, & won it, for you...
* :)
APK
P.S.=> He's really in for a shock when 1 of 2 things happen:
---
1.) When he finally gets to retirement, only to find out what the construction unions did with Madoff ripping them off (I cover more of THAT in my reply to him -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3468517&cid=42931717 ) & his "holy dollar"/Ca$h is GONE with the dawn...
OR
2.) When HE gets "downsized" & has to "tap into it" himself thinking it's enough in a drought of jobs, due to offshoring/downsizing/outsourcing & tax shenanigans like this foisted on us by "lobbyists" (God I hate that shit, twisting words or using "new terms" to lessen the blow of what it REALLY is, bribery), or those using the "revolving door", ala Cheney, to go into office in politics for DECADES behind the scenes, to "change the rules on the fly" as they see fit, then get out into "KORPORATE AMERIKA" again to reap the benefits!
---
No... when you deal with these bastards? You have to "channel your inner criminal" & realize - they're all thieves in suits, nothing more... then, by understanding them?? You can avoid or get the best of them.
(Now - As to any tax reducing financial 'planning' he's been snowed into believing by the schmucks that foist it on others, failing to tell them that the 'rats running the race' & I mean RUNNING IT @ THE TOP, will raid it & drink it dry NOT leaving a drop for stooges they pulled the wool over their eyes w/ that "magical beanstalk" shit!)
You do that? You face paying penalties for doing so, getting RIPPED OFF, yet again, & then burning thru it in no time flat expecting there to be work... & there WON'T be!
... apk
Without any income, there could be no government and no shared resources. While I certainly see benefits to reducing government in some areas, it sounds like you're advocating no government. I'm genuinely curious, would you prefer the times when there was no tax, no public resources, and each individual was responsible for negotiating rates for each bridge and road they traveled? Would you prefer to drink only well water, which could not be evaluated for safety because no testing body existed to validate the marketing claims of the water testing products you traded your precious metals for? How would this be different from the lawless days of the wild west or a failed state such as Somalia?
Facebook supported Obama in 2012, and pays no taxes.
What a coincidence!
This is why the tax code is retarded. Under this rule you get a break, under another rule you get a deduction, and another rule puts you at a different tax rate for some portion. What a stupid system. We need to get rid of all income taxes and just do sales tax. Then there's no need for loopholes and tax deductions. You pay taxes when you buy something... end of story.
Except... they don't pay taxes, can't get arrested for egregious crimes, and can legally bribe government officials.
http://www.businessinsider.com/profits-versus-wages
Casteism
Look, facebook and any other company pays lots of payroll taxes for it's employees, it pays peoples wages super and all this other crap. So it DOES pay taxes.
For an individual Just like you and I when our accountant says, 'you need to pay this much....' into a big black hole'... the instant reaction of us, is 'oh can we somehow reduce this..' then your accountant says 'well, what else can we claim, oh yes this and that..' in the end, facebook and any other large company/corp do the same. Just at a large scale. - The article makes out that NO taxes where ever paid, that's just crap.
Anyway, its similar to the Mining in Australia right now, they say they made 'no profit' and so pay no additional profit taxes. That's because just like you and I, we don't want to put money into a 'black hole'. We work too hard to have OUR money into some tax to pay for random rubbish that generally goes overseas or into the wind.
Nothing can be done except manage the tax income properly the country receives. The truth us, most small/medium business don't make any profit, with all the bullshit rates, power, water, gas, wages, etc etc, the owner is left with DEBT and RISK and WORRY. The owners of these businesses draw a small wage and afterall the 24/7 time they put into the whole affair they might have a few perks- if they are lucky.
Anyway, it's never what it seems.