Seems like a false apple/orange. Isn't the implicit proposal to change laws so the legal minimum and the moral minimum are brought to parity?
It finally clicked for me that some people seem to believe that there is a difference between a company’s legal minimum tax obligation and a company’s moral minimum tax obligation. I’d be fascinated to see someone take a stab at writing a framework for calculating the latter.https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1139188173131591685 …
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1) the legal minimum and moral minimum are always at parity. 2) the way to get Amazon to pay substantially more taxes is to eliminate carryforwarded losses, which I don’t think any reasonable person on either side is proposing.
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There are many moral minimums that people are currently demanding companies live up to that would be better served as regulation. I think this is probably driven by lack of responsiveness in government (from partisan gridlock, regulatory capture, etc.)
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Definitely. But in order for Amazon to have paid substantially more in taxes, carryforward losses would need to be eliminated - and I don’t think any reasonable politician is suggesting that be done.
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It probably also has to do with the effort involved. Legal ways to reduce taxes that require eg. 10+ lawyers or entities in multiple countries give large cos an advantage over smaller ones that many perceive as unfair.
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How would you codify this? What’s the maximum amount of effort ($) allowed in tax optimization in order to maintain morality?
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Hmm, maybe I’ll write this. I agree with Amazon, but *also* think that it’s normal for one feedback mechanism to be social capital pressure towards companies paying more than legal min obligation. And this is valid discourse and field of debate
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Just as tax law shows us the pressures government wants to align companies on allocation of capital. Society exerts social pressure which then also is peer level alignment. Ie. amazon may find better to put a little less in capex investments and in “official” taxes
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Incidentally, any government that uses tax incentives (= practically every government) is implicitly stating that they do not believe this.
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