Is there any evidence that any of these companies paid less in taxes than the law requires?

If so, they should be prosecuted. If not, Nancy & Co. should start legislating... (or Dem's should stop complaining).

You do realize that the Executive enforces the Tax Code but the Legislature writes it... Don't you?

Or are you suggesting that Trump should order the IRS to target Amazon for unusual scrutiny? Should that scrutiny be limited to Amazon, or should it include Bezos and his other holdings (like the Washington Post)?... Yeah... no one would accuse Trump of using the IRS to harass his enemies if he did that... would they?

Fuck, good for them. If only I could figure out how to do that.

Is it possible they have loss carryovers from prior years? Did you look at the returns themselves? It'd be easy to spot.

The loss of federal revenue from the tax cut has to be taken into consideration with a strong GDP, low unemployment, and recent wage growth. The result such analysis if not known, but is worthy of consideration.

Good for them: they bring plenty of high paying jobs into our area the provides money for all of the social welfare programs The Stranger just loves.

@9,

Did those poor who paid no income tax also make billions in profits?

No representation without taxation.

You too can pay $0 of federal income tax as long as you can classify your goods as a section 1231 asset, own them for more than one year, and actually use them for some kind of customer service. Then since those goods were used or otherwise depreciated, you can then choose to accelerate their depreciation, meaning the asset's value depreciates at a greater rate the earlier it is in it's life.

This way, you can defer and reduce corporate taxes in exchange for having increased taxable income in later years.

Also, you can always carry over tons of deferred expenditures from previous years, which is an expenditure that has been made, yet will not be counted as an expense until a future date. So basically, you have an expense, but you defer it, meaning it is counted as an asset until it expires, at which point it is considered an expense, which affects the level of taxation. This is often done in order to comply with the matching principle.

Are you still with me? Of course you aren't! Accounting is boring and hard to understand. But really this is much more an accounting quirk than a tax code issue.

But at the end of the day, Amazon will legally have to pay these taxes eventually, just in later years. In business, you always want to maximize the amount of time money stays in your hand, and minimize the time that money goes to another hand.

Expanding on @8, "Amazon paid $250 million in Washington state and local taxes in 2017, source says" ( https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-paid-250-million-in-washington-state-and-local-taxes-in-2017-source-says/ )