this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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I can't believe I'm saying this, but these companies need to pay more taxes. Losing $3.9 billion dollars on a stupid vanity project because they have nothing else to spend it on is ridiculous. Higher taxes would at least force them to be more efficient.
You're not really talking about higher taxes, you're talking about reworking the corporate tax system. As things stand now higher taxes would encourage more of this sort of behavior, not less.
Corporations only pay taxes on profits, so money spent on business activities, re-invested back into the company, paid to employees, etc. is not taxed. In this system, taxes are kind of a penalty paid for taking money out of the business; the higher taxes are the less incentivized profit-taking is.
If your company made $100 million in profits at a 20% tax rate you get to take home $80 million as opposed to re-investing $100 million back in the company and not paying any taxes, so the incentive to re-invest isn't very high. But if your company made $100 million in profits at a 40% tax rate now you can only take home $60 million as opposed to re-investing $100 million, which becomes a much better value proposition on re-investment.
Whether VR works for Meta or not, they have invested in technology and built careers for employees. This is why we should have corporate taxes. I'd rather see corporations keep employees and advance technology instead of giving dividends to the wealthiest people in the world. While the product might not work out, I bet there are many people who worked on it that will take those skills to new projects.
Many people have no clue how taxes work, but darn it, they wanted them raised. It just encourages other behaviors, such as offshoring money, as many companies do. We really need a complete write of the tax code to encourage paying workers well, creating jobs, etc and less focus on avoiding paying the taxes. I don't care if a company makes billions in profit if their workers are all paid well, treated well, etc. We will make it up with them having money to spend in the economy.
I am still not convinced VR is a worthy technology outside of a few niche uses. I went to the verge when that was open and that was pretty cool. At home is nothing like that.
Investment is good. Public policy is usually designed to encourage it that's why investment has good tax avoidance that is exactly what the government wants.
But VR is cool