No, it's the opposite. It's saying, "get the facts first", and I gave a few examples (some positive and some negative), at a high level of abstraction, of what would and wouldn't be objectionable.
I completely agree that you shouldn't need to know the whole tax code to say, "deducting arbitrary figures for payments to a foreign subsidiary shouldn't be allowed and is shady". But "profits didn't cancel out recent losses, thus no taxable income" is not shady.
All I'm saying is, you can't even have the discussion until you know what case you're talking about. Is that really controversial? Did it really sound like I was saying this is too complicated to understand? Is there a better way I could have said it?
It is really contreversial to have a defensive tone when it comes to corporate taxes. Tell me a year you made money and paid 0 taxes. Or anyone? Why cant we have a sceptical approach when the topic in question is large corps?
Most of people here do not rely 100% on investment income, I assume, thus such a situation would be impossible for them, since labor income tax does not allow to deduct this much. But I have successfully lowered my taxes at occasion where I incurred some substantial investment losses (the startup I owned stock in folded). It didn't make my tax to zero (and thank God, because this would mean I've lost as much as I make, I don't want this kind of losses) but it did reduce my taxes.
> Why cant we have a sceptical approach when the topic in question is large corps?
Sure we can, in fact we must. But skeptical approach means get the facts, verify them, then make decision. Not read the outline, feel outraged, reject any reasonable explanation because we must be skeptical about large corps. Having losses carried over from previous years is nothing wrong, and one part of being skeptical is being able to recognize there's no "there" there, and move on.
> The average joe doesn't need to grok the whole tax code to know it's wrong when one of the most high profile profitable companies doesn't pay any income tax.
The problem is that this is false. I mean, it is true on very short term - but then you can as well be outraged about Netflix not paying taxes this Monday, and ignore the fact that they paid tax on Thursday. If you read the article and try to figure out what it actually says, you'll find out that they do pay taxes (albeit, claimed that at lower rate - 13.6% - no idea why, or how it was calculated, based on what, so one can't verify it) even if they didn't pay income taxes (they probably still pay a lot of other taxes) in one particular period of time. If the average joe can't grok this, it's ok, but then it's probably premature for the average joe to have an opinion on the tax policy. Not that this ever stopped anybody...
> That indicates the system is fucked.
No it does not. It indicates that a clickbait article successfully triggered you into an outrage fit without informing you or enhancing your knowledge.
> There isn't a technicality in the universe that will indicate that somehow our perception is wrong.
If you actually read the article, you'll easily find out why your perception is wrong. It plainly says that Netflix does pay taxes, if you bother to look beyond one single year. Given how many corporations are in the US, and how uneven business cycle and investment/profit undulations are, there always would be cases where some corporation lost a ton last year, and then made some profit this year, but this profit is offset with last year's loss, so they pay little or no taxes in single year. You can always find such examples and blow an outrage out of it. But if you bother to understand it, then you'd see there's nothing to be outraged about - if the profits over longer term are higher than losses over the same term, it will be taxed. Maybe not this year but next - who cares.
