Taxation of the huge companies is obviously different than that of others. An army of accountants and lawyers work to find law loopholes to inflate the expenses. And then bribery can come to play. Which public servant can resist millions of dollars? They have to pay attention nobody finds out though.
Where is this figure coming from? According to Meta's press release, the effective tax rate is 30% [1].
> The full year 2025 provision for income taxes includes the effects of the implementation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act during the third quarter of 2025. Absent the valuation allowance charge as of the enactment date, our full year 2025 effective tax rate would have decreased by 17 percentage points to 13%, compared to the reported effective tax rate of 30%.
If you dig into the details in the Income Tax Disclosure block, Meta paid $2.8B in Federal income taxes for the year ended December 31, 2025.
Meta deferred a large chunk of Federal income taxes.
So, while the effective Federal income tax rate for 2025 was about 30%, largely due to a 3rd quarter charge of $14B against deferred taxes (Meta's effective tax rate for 2023 was 17.6% and for 2024 it was 11.8%), they paid 3.5% of their income as Federal income tax.
Mostly never -- most of the deferral was an accounting adjustment for the value of future tax credits that they could no longer take advantage of, so there is no actual tax liability here that will eventually be paid.
I bet the two sources won't agree on what values go into the denominator and / or numerator of their effective tax rate calculations. It can be as simple as the 3.5% being a calculated rate on revenue rather than profit
You can't just throw revenue in the denominator, though. Business tax is assessed on income. If you're going to make a claim about tax rate using an unconventional metric, you need to be explicit about what you've done; Reich isn't.
Yeah, screw Robert Reich! Always looking out for the workers who make up the majority of this country. Why won't he look out for the poor multi-national corporations, who have no one to advocate for them or their tax rates?
Your parent post isn’t suggesting it’s always the same user submitting, just that users submit a lot of posts from this person.
Can’t say I agree, though. I don’t recall ever having seen one of his posts on HN, and a cursory search suggests they’re not even upvoted that much. Highest I found was under 30 points. But my methodology is flawed, as I basically searched for the name.
Sure, and there are a ton of ways to shifting income around. For example selling a subsidiary in lower tax jurisdiction patents and then paying for their usage. Another example is Hollywood accounting where productions pay exorbitant rates for equipment and catering to affiliated companies. This inflates the costs so the movies end up unprofitable despite smashing box office.
This is incorrect as anyone who has looked at a financial statement or taken a first level accounting class will know - Revenue is the top line, the gross income and lastly net income, the two reflecting the removal of various costs/expenses as per GAAP.
Income != profit. Income is revenue. It sure would be nice if businesses were taxed on income, given that’s how people are taxed and all. Aren’t corporations supposedly people now thanks to citizens united?
I appreciate your polite corrections with well sourced info! Being a bit silly, I’ll say you’re a shiny beam of knowledge in a dark expanse of confusion
There is no real concept of sources legitimately disagreeing here. There is tax law, which Meta uses to calculate its tax liability, and then there are lies.
While they provisioned $25B, the 10-K Meta filed states they paid $2.8B in Federal income taxes for the full year 2025. The amount they provisioned is not limited to Federal income taxes, it also includes state and foreign income taxes.
I am not an accountant or finance professional but the table they refer to has the 2.8B under "current" and the 25B figure under "total".
Is it just that of their 2025 taxes, they paid 2.8B during that calendar year and it's only Feb and the remaining was not yet actually paid out at the time that filing was prepared?
Interesting. Wouldn’t surprise me if there are different ways to report the same numbers to make the situation seem more or less favorable. Statisticians and accountants are both professional liars (speaking as a statistician married to an accountant).
In this instance, only two combinations -- accurate and favorable vs inaccurate and unfavorable.
Meta and Meta's accountants spoke the truth in their audited financial statements. I cannot speak to the motivation in their hearts, but I am aware that there are significant financial and criminal consequences to publishing incorrect financial statements.
If entity A declares such and such incomes and expenses, it could be truthful or not.
If entity A is truthfully declaring such and such incomes and expenses, why would it reference it's own declaration as the "reported effective tax rate of 30%".
On the other hand if A is not truthfully declaring such and such incomes and expenses, and a legal team is very careful in maintaining an exact wording towards the government, then any tax-related comments by A which are not made by the legal team would either be self-censored or censored by the legal team to never reference "the effective tax rate" but rather a "reported" one, it basically reads like a superscript referring the reader to some other carefully worded fine print in other documents.
What prevented the more natural language of "[...] compared to the effective tax rate of 30%." ? Under what circumstances would you add such a word?
EDIT: this is not to say that this word constitutes an effective admission of lying, but rather that they don't actually want to talk about it, while pretending to be openly talking about it.
EDIT2: whenever companies get away with substantially lower tax rates, employee shortages in the rest of the economy can be seen as low-effective-taxed companies "stealing" employees from the rest of the economy, perhaps with or without approval from the government. If the government approves it is effectively a state-sponsored enterprise, and if it doesn't it would probably like to know about it since productivity of the economy could be improved by reassigning those employees into companies that allow themselves to be properly taxed (whatever that means!)
In the US, public companies generally must report their financial results according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). They can also report other numbers, and that's what they're doing in footnote (1); they think one particular adjustment GAAP requires them to make might be misleading, and they helpfully disclose that they would have calculated 13% if not for that adjustment. But they are not allowed to say that the GAAP number is wrong or untruthful, nor to put the non-GAAP number in the topline and the GAAP adjustment in the footnote.
Yeah this is a weird low quality submission to HN (no offense OP). Microblogging has questionable value for anything beyond “hot takes” and “breaking news” (and keeping people angry and misinformed enough to vote).
That's why I often ask for "Source?" — because sometimes people seem to make up numbers. However, whenever I do this, I receive a large number of downvotes. Maybe it's not common on HN to back up claims with sources.
I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective. Your comment raises an interesting point, and I would genuinely like to understand it more thoroughly.
Would you mind clarifying what source or reference you are relying on for that statement? I am asking in the spirit of constructive dialogue, not to challenge you, but to better understand the foundation of your view. If there is a specific study, report, dataset, or publication that informed your conclusion, I would be grateful if you could point me toward it.
Having access to the underlying source would help ensure that the discussion remains grounded in verifiable information and would allow others, including myself, to review the context and methodology behind the claim. That, in turn, would make the exchange more substantive and productive.
Thank you in advance for any clarification you can provide.
This is also a low effort comment, despite the word count.
In contrast, shubhamjain found Meta's earnings release for the specified time period, quoted numbers that appear to contradict the claim, and provided a link to the release. This adds to the conversation, while a comment that says "Source?" or a few paragraphs that can be reduced to "Source?" do not.
I would imagine it's more you're being skeptical of something that is unpopular to be skeptical about. It's like someone saying climate change is impacting our planet, and then asking "source?" in response.
No, that's not correct. I ask "Source?" when someone makes a claim that goes against popular belief, such as: "climate change is not impacting our planet." I do think "Source?" is generally considered a low-effort response, so it's the wording I guess, not the context.
Taxes are a subject of frequent liberal conspiracy theories. You will see all sorts of blatantly false claims like this because left wing misinformation spreaders like Robert Reich make up their own tax calculations that have no relation whatsoever to actual tax law.
No need to limit this to "liberal" conspiracy theories. Trump and his admin's statements on how tariffs and other taxes work and who pays them have been full of blatantly false claims.
It’s a fair retort here, though, where the grandparent comment was clearly trying to grandstand in opposition to his perceived enemy tribe, mostly unprovoked.
Edit: in other words, it’s a fair interpretation of the comment to be saying “We wouldn’t have to deal with all this misinformation about taxes if there wasn’t some giant liberal conspiracy”, given that they weren’t replying to any specific part of the parent post.
As someone who ran his own business for over eight years paying close to 30% tax (and is soon going to do it again), I have very mixed feelings about companies using tricks to reduce their tax burden. I mean, I like it when I do it, and I feel justified because there isn't that much that I can claim tax relief from, but seeing a big company paying such low tax rate feels wrong (even though it may be completely legal).
Having said that, there is something to be said of all the tax that is indirectly being generated by Meta: they pay high salaries, and the people receiving those high salaries will pay a significant amount of income tax. Same for all the dividends that they pay out. Maybe just being a big money-mover is their excuse?
> Having said that, there is something to be said of all the tax that is indirectly being generated by Meta: they pay high salaries, and the people receiving those high salaries will pay a significant amount of income tax.
So a few people at the top who have more money than Lucifer himself keep getting richer until they are richer than God, and the people at the bottom take on the burden. How is that a fair or good system?
Here’s a better one: Raise taxes on large corporations and obscenely rich individuals and lower them for the people on the bottom. Then Meta can pay lower salaries, but the people getting them will still be able to keep as much or more as before. Meanwhile Meta gets less money to spend around destroying democracy, and tax revenue increases for the government who can spend them to better the lives of every citizen.
Wouldn’t that be preferable?
Let’s ignore for a moment the current bonkers situation in the US, where more tax revenue would only mean more money to be stolen from the people to enrich one guy and his circle of close friends. Hey, like Meta is doing!
21% has been the highest possible corporate tax rate since 2017. It's not really fair to compare what Meta pays now to what you paid under an entirely different tax regime. You would also pay less in taxes running your business today than you did previously.
The issue that that taxes fundamentally bind two moralities: and individual and social one.
Societies generally thrive better when there is a certain level of equality. Not a hundred percent, but enough for social mobility and for people to be aspirational.
No or low taxes remove that opportunity. It bears people from taking an education and forces them in poverty.
Big corporations don't pay taxes the same way as regular folks' businesses. Here in the UK the tax rates are _negotiated_ for the big guys. The system is entirely opaque and invites corruption.
Most small businesses are pass through entities in the United States and pay no corporate taxes at all so it's certainly not the case that "The game is heavily rigged to favor large companies."
"Why don't most people simply create billion-dollar companies so they can also benefit from tax benefits you can only capture at scale? As long as we make it easy to create billion-dollar companies this should work."
To the extent that this is even true it appears to be caused by three things: stock option compensation accounting, R&D deductions and bonus depreciation.
Stock option compensation rules have been a boon because Meta stock has risen 6x in three years. It's unlikely to do that again. My understanding is that this is symmetrical so if the stock trends down we will see an inflated effective tax rate for Meta.
Recent R&D rule changes allowing software engineering salaries for R&D to be written off seem reasonable and were quite popular on Hacker News. Previously these expenses were amortized over five years so this just pulls it forward. Subsequents years will see depressed expenses.
Bonus depreciation is once again just pulling forward legitimate expenses earlier than before. At worst they are just delaying giving the government its taxes and the corporations gain a few points of interest in between.
All of the tax rules used here are open to debate but none seem obviously wrong or nefarious. This is why people like Reich choose to keep things vague. Corporations brazenly stealing from your pocket is much more interesting than the mundane reality.
You don't need a startup. Millions of people have an effective tax rate that is 0% and they have a net tax rate that is negative. They do this simply by having no meaningful skills or knowledge.
Unless he links directly to evidence that backs up what he says, I’ve learned to tune out Robert Reich.
For a guy who is a Rhodes Scholar, a college professor, and a former Secretary of Labor he has a remarkable tendency to leave out qualifying context when making these statements.
He’s smart enough to formulate arguments with the appropriate context and still make it accessible to the general public - but he consistently chooses not to.
A few weeks ago he was trying to compare the “millionaire tax” of my home state of Massachusetts, with the proposed California wealth tax as evidence that the California tax would not cause flight of wealthy taxpayers:
Never once did he mention that the Massachusetts tax is a bog standard conventional tax on income, compared to this new concept of a global total wealth tax.
Lies, damned lies and statistics. They are fudging statistics so they arent technically lying but leave out context and stretch definitions to make their point.
I'm SE and there are quite a few tax breaks available, especially if you structure as a S-Corp. The hard part is figuring out what all tax breaks are available as they're constantly changing, like last year you can deduct dental insurance premiums.
I still pay an eye watering amount, and being SE shows you the brutality of the system (estimated taxes are insane, especially the payment schedule for them when you're NET 30/60).
Kinda, for Q2 and Q3 you're expected to pay the full amount for the quarter about a month or so before it ends. So it's less the accounting method kinda and more I haven't been paid for a month that I already owe taxes for.
> it's only available for big corporations because as a self-employed, it's close to 30%.
Well maybe instead of complaining you should simply just generate more economic value. If Meta disappeared tomorrow it would hit the US economy, if you disappeared tomorrow it wouldn’t even be noticeable in the stock market.
It’s more like “might makes right” I think, and it’s not really me embracing it, as much as realizing this is the ideology of our ruling elites and they aren’t afraid to be frank about it anymore.
No, I think both of the following statements can be true at the same time:
1. The audited financial statement meets all requirements and is accurate according to the relevant definitions, stating that the effective federal tax rate is 30%.
I don't think those statements can be true at the same time, without significant qualifications on (2) in a way that make it meaningless. Certainly not the reasonable straightforward reading of the phrase.
Maybe you are right, but maybe the significant qualifications are on (1) in a way that make it meaningless.
There is a reason why large companies have entire departments dedicated to identifying and utilizing every available national and international tax loophole, all while working to maintain a positive public image.
Well, we need taxes to have a functioning economy. So what is really needed is that we close loopholes that allow corporations to pay less than individuals
Taxes is a net benefit (at least here in Europe): you basically get better services (that you would pay anyway) for much cheaper: education, healthcare, culture, etc
You just have to buy of equipment used for a business purpose that you can depreciate. You then put these on Form 4562 or something.
This is a bit tongue in cheek. The American tax system is set up to tax at the point of consumption. There'd be no difference in how much money actually ended up in your hand if we switched everything over to a VAT, except a lot of people would probably be relieved of the psychological burden of taxes.
ITEP gets the number by dividing Meta’s current federal tax expense ($2.82B) by its domestic pretax income ($79.64B), which is about 3.5–3.6%.
But Meta’s total 2025 GAAP effective tax rate was actually 29.6%, because it also booked a huge $15.93B charge tied to the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax and valuation allowances.
Both numbers are wrong. Meta's actual income before tax was about $83 billion and its actual tax cost was $25 billion. This is an effective tax rate of ~30%.
Perhaps, but the entire ecosystem of associated buzzwords/ideas is pretty popular in our culture today: "job creator" C-suite executives magically "create" jobs and/or raise pay because their budget for taxes goes down and they just don't know where else to put the cash, thus everyone benefits. Is it a straw man? Sure. Is it the same pablum often delivered by the evening news and politicians? Yes. Is reality a TON more complicated and often counter-intuitive? Yep. (Raising wages doesn't seem to have a _direct_ correlation to inflation, it's correlated but often lagging and muted in response; job creation seems to be mostly a market effect not corporate decision; the modern definition of "fiduciary duty" means extra cash should go toward immediate stockholder benefit so stock buybacks are always FAR more likely than employee benefits; etc; etc).
The one area I'd push back strong on is that nobody is "advocating" for it. Many stockholding orgs/individuals are. They don't care if its a straw man, they know what the real-world systemic effects are of lower taxation rates.
Conventional conservative/capitalist wisdom is that corporations "don't pay taxes" because they just "pass it along to consumers as higher prices". That's why the juxtaposition here, that they are spending tens of millions to influence elections, is important. If corporations were just efficient market operators that moved goods and services, why so much lobbying? It's because the rich owners of corporations realized that with a small tweak, which we know retroactively as "Citizens United vs FEC", they could harness their corporate ownership to control the political, social, and governance landscape of the world.
> Conventional conservative/capitalist wisdom is that corporations "don't pay taxes" because they just "pass it along to consumers as higher prices".
I'm with you, but a couple things: 1) Do you mean "shouldn't pay taxes"? Because I'm pretty sure their thing is getting corporations (and the wealthy) to pay less taxes than they already do. 2) That's not wisdom, it's a propaganda-meme. It's a misleading little story (mainly through omission) meant to get people to support a policy that's bad for them.
Maybe it’s just more visible now but it seems like these companies are really accelerating in their evil lately. Probably because they know this admin’s going to do jack shit to protect people. Would be funny if it wasn’t also so scary.
> Maybe it’s just more visible now but it seems like these companies are really accelerating in their evil lately.
Well I mean they have no incentive to behave any other way, if anything they are rewarded via the shareholders. Number goes up when they perform mass layoffs. That tells you everything you need to know.
Unchecked power deteriorates empathy as classes drift further apart — an inevitability of un(der)regulated capitalism driving unprecedented inequality. This accelerates when the billionaire class seizes the levers of power and dismantle entire regulatory bodies like the Epstein class has done with the US government.
Taxation of the huge companies is obviously different than that of others. An army of accountants and lawyers work to find law loopholes to inflate the expenses. And then bribery can come to play. Which public servant can resist millions of dollars? They have to pay attention nobody finds out though.
Where is this figure coming from? According to Meta's press release, the effective tax rate is 30% [1].
> The full year 2025 provision for income taxes includes the effects of the implementation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act during the third quarter of 2025. Absent the valuation allowance charge as of the enactment date, our full year 2025 effective tax rate would have decreased by 17 percentage points to 13%, compared to the reported effective tax rate of 30%.
[1]: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
The effective federal tax rate, and the amount of federal tax Meta paid as a percentage of income, are two different things.
More details here: https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/
The 10-K filed by Meta is linked to in that article, and can be found here: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001...
If you dig into the details in the Income Tax Disclosure block, Meta paid $2.8B in Federal income taxes for the year ended December 31, 2025.
Meta deferred a large chunk of Federal income taxes.
So, while the effective Federal income tax rate for 2025 was about 30%, largely due to a 3rd quarter charge of $14B against deferred taxes (Meta's effective tax rate for 2023 was 17.6% and for 2024 it was 11.8%), they paid 3.5% of their income as Federal income tax.
>Meta deferred a large chunk of Federal income taxes.
How are can we reasonably expect them to be deferred for? Are we talking on the order of years, or decades?
Mostly never -- most of the deferral was an accounting adjustment for the value of future tax credits that they could no longer take advantage of, so there is no actual tax liability here that will eventually be paid.
I bet the two sources won't agree on what values go into the denominator and / or numerator of their effective tax rate calculations. It can be as simple as the 3.5% being a calculated rate on revenue rather than profit
You can't just throw revenue in the denominator, though. Business tax is assessed on income. If you're going to make a claim about tax rate using an unconventional metric, you need to be explicit about what you've done; Reich isn't.
If you're Robert Reich, you can! You can make up anything, and someone will submit it to HN to waste everyone's time!
Yeah, screw Robert Reich! Always looking out for the workers who make up the majority of this country. Why won't he look out for the poor multi-national corporations, who have no one to advocate for them or their tax rates?
Hey, he can advocate for whatever causes he likes. I just think honesty makes a more compelling argument than lies.
> Always looking out for the workers
How is spreading misinformation looking out for the workers?
I thought there were systems designed to effectively negate users that submit too many misleading posts.
Your parent post isn’t suggesting it’s always the same user submitting, just that users submit a lot of posts from this person.
Can’t say I agree, though. I don’t recall ever having seen one of his posts on HN, and a cursory search suggests they’re not even upvoted that much. Highest I found was under 30 points. But my methodology is flawed, as I basically searched for the name.
Sure, and there are a ton of ways to shifting income around. For example selling a subsidiary in lower tax jurisdiction patents and then paying for their usage. Another example is Hollywood accounting where productions pay exorbitant rates for equipment and catering to affiliated companies. This inflates the costs so the movies end up unprofitable despite smashing box office.
> Business tax is assessed on income.
Income (in a business) is another word for revenue. I think you meant: business tax is assessed on profit.
In the U.S. income is defined as revenue minus expenses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_(United_States_legal_de...
No, my usage was correct and unambiguous. Describing income as revenue is incorrect. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/122214/what-differe...
This is incorrect as anyone who has looked at a financial statement or taken a first level accounting class will know - Revenue is the top line, the gross income and lastly net income, the two reflecting the removal of various costs/expenses as per GAAP.
Income != profit. Income is revenue. It sure would be nice if businesses were taxed on income, given that’s how people are taxed and all. Aren’t corporations supposedly people now thanks to citizens united?
You're mistaken. Income is net of expenses. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/122214/what-differe...
I appreciate your polite corrections with well sourced info! Being a bit silly, I’ll say you’re a shiny beam of knowledge in a dark expanse of confusion
There is no real concept of sources legitimately disagreeing here. There is tax law, which Meta uses to calculate its tax liability, and then there are lies.
Even if you mistakenly calculate the rate on revenue, you will get 25474/200966=13%.
I think it's from this: https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/
The post seems to be comparing quarterly figures for tax with annual profit. The doc they cite clearly $25B as provision for income tax.
While they provisioned $25B, the 10-K Meta filed states they paid $2.8B in Federal income taxes for the full year 2025. The amount they provisioned is not limited to Federal income taxes, it also includes state and foreign income taxes.
I am not an accountant or finance professional but the table they refer to has the 2.8B under "current" and the 25B figure under "total". Is it just that of their 2025 taxes, they paid 2.8B during that calendar year and it's only Feb and the remaining was not yet actually paid out at the time that filing was prepared?
Interesting. Wouldn’t surprise me if there are different ways to report the same numbers to make the situation seem more or less favorable. Statisticians and accountants are both professional liars (speaking as a statistician married to an accountant).
> Wouldn’t surprise me if there are different ways to report the same numbers to make the situation seem more or less favorable.
Yeah -- accurately, and inaccurately.
Are you implying that there are four quadrants:
Or are you implying that Meta spoke the God’s honest truth out of a sense of societal duty and honor.In this instance, only two combinations -- accurate and favorable vs inaccurate and unfavorable.
Meta and Meta's accountants spoke the truth in their audited financial statements. I cannot speak to the motivation in their hearts, but I am aware that there are significant financial and criminal consequences to publishing incorrect financial statements.
Can the post be community noted?
If entity A declares such and such incomes and expenses, it could be truthful or not.
If entity A is truthfully declaring such and such incomes and expenses, why would it reference it's own declaration as the "reported effective tax rate of 30%".
On the other hand if A is not truthfully declaring such and such incomes and expenses, and a legal team is very careful in maintaining an exact wording towards the government, then any tax-related comments by A which are not made by the legal team would either be self-censored or censored by the legal team to never reference "the effective tax rate" but rather a "reported" one, it basically reads like a superscript referring the reader to some other carefully worded fine print in other documents.
What prevented the more natural language of "[...] compared to the effective tax rate of 30%." ? Under what circumstances would you add such a word?
EDIT: this is not to say that this word constitutes an effective admission of lying, but rather that they don't actually want to talk about it, while pretending to be openly talking about it.
EDIT2: whenever companies get away with substantially lower tax rates, employee shortages in the rest of the economy can be seen as low-effective-taxed companies "stealing" employees from the rest of the economy, perhaps with or without approval from the government. If the government approves it is effectively a state-sponsored enterprise, and if it doesn't it would probably like to know about it since productivity of the economy could be improved by reassigning those employees into companies that allow themselves to be properly taxed (whatever that means!)
In the US, public companies generally must report their financial results according to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). They can also report other numbers, and that's what they're doing in footnote (1); they think one particular adjustment GAAP requires them to make might be misleading, and they helpfully disclose that they would have calculated 13% if not for that adjustment. But they are not allowed to say that the GAAP number is wrong or untruthful, nor to put the non-GAAP number in the topline and the GAAP adjustment in the footnote.
Yeah this is a weird low quality submission to HN (no offense OP). Microblogging has questionable value for anything beyond “hot takes” and “breaking news” (and keeping people angry and misinformed enough to vote).
I'm shocked, absolutely shocked that a Bluesky post would be deliberately misleading to push a narrative that we need more taxes.
I don't know why that's specific to one social media network. I see deliberately misleading posts on all of them.
Sure, but being misleading to push for more taxes is more characteristic of Bluesky than many others.
That's why I often ask for "Source?" — because sometimes people seem to make up numbers. However, whenever I do this, I receive a large number of downvotes. Maybe it's not common on HN to back up claims with sources.
There is another possibility. “Source?” is a low effort comment, but GP’s is not.
I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective. Your comment raises an interesting point, and I would genuinely like to understand it more thoroughly.
Would you mind clarifying what source or reference you are relying on for that statement? I am asking in the spirit of constructive dialogue, not to challenge you, but to better understand the foundation of your view. If there is a specific study, report, dataset, or publication that informed your conclusion, I would be grateful if you could point me toward it.
Having access to the underlying source would help ensure that the discussion remains grounded in verifiable information and would allow others, including myself, to review the context and methodology behind the claim. That, in turn, would make the exchange more substantive and productive.
Thank you in advance for any clarification you can provide.
This is also a low effort comment, despite the word count.
In contrast, shubhamjain found Meta's earnings release for the specified time period, quoted numbers that appear to contradict the claim, and provided a link to the release. This adds to the conversation, while a comment that says "Source?" or a few paragraphs that can be reduced to "Source?" do not.
What benefit do you gain by having an llm write comments on HN? I don't get it.
Too brief, minus 10 marks.
It's more likely your attitude rather than your quest for verification that gets you downvotes.
My intentions are sincere, maybe it is the wording.
I would imagine it's more you're being skeptical of something that is unpopular to be skeptical about. It's like someone saying climate change is impacting our planet, and then asking "source?" in response.
No, that's not correct. I ask "Source?" when someone makes a claim that goes against popular belief, such as: "climate change is not impacting our planet." I do think "Source?" is generally considered a low-effort response, so it's the wording I guess, not the context.
Except he was skeptical about Meta's effective tax rate being 3%. Why are you making up scenarios that aren't real to justify hurting him?
Taxes are a subject of frequent liberal conspiracy theories. You will see all sorts of blatantly false claims like this because left wing misinformation spreaders like Robert Reich make up their own tax calculations that have no relation whatsoever to actual tax law.
No need to limit this to "liberal" conspiracy theories. Trump and his admin's statements on how tariffs and other taxes work and who pays them have been full of blatantly false claims.
"X does A" does not mean "only X does A."
It’s a fair retort here, though, where the grandparent comment was clearly trying to grandstand in opposition to his perceived enemy tribe, mostly unprovoked.
Edit: in other words, it’s a fair interpretation of the comment to be saying “We wouldn’t have to deal with all this misinformation about taxes if there wasn’t some giant liberal conspiracy”, given that they weren’t replying to any specific part of the parent post.
As someone who ran his own business for over eight years paying close to 30% tax (and is soon going to do it again), I have very mixed feelings about companies using tricks to reduce their tax burden. I mean, I like it when I do it, and I feel justified because there isn't that much that I can claim tax relief from, but seeing a big company paying such low tax rate feels wrong (even though it may be completely legal).
Having said that, there is something to be said of all the tax that is indirectly being generated by Meta: they pay high salaries, and the people receiving those high salaries will pay a significant amount of income tax. Same for all the dividends that they pay out. Maybe just being a big money-mover is their excuse?
> Having said that, there is something to be said of all the tax that is indirectly being generated by Meta: they pay high salaries, and the people receiving those high salaries will pay a significant amount of income tax.
So a few people at the top who have more money than Lucifer himself keep getting richer until they are richer than God, and the people at the bottom take on the burden. How is that a fair or good system?
Here’s a better one: Raise taxes on large corporations and obscenely rich individuals and lower them for the people on the bottom. Then Meta can pay lower salaries, but the people getting them will still be able to keep as much or more as before. Meanwhile Meta gets less money to spend around destroying democracy, and tax revenue increases for the government who can spend them to better the lives of every citizen.
Wouldn’t that be preferable?
Let’s ignore for a moment the current bonkers situation in the US, where more tax revenue would only mean more money to be stolen from the people to enrich one guy and his circle of close friends. Hey, like Meta is doing!
21% has been the highest possible corporate tax rate since 2017. It's not really fair to compare what Meta pays now to what you paid under an entirely different tax regime. You would also pay less in taxes running your business today than you did previously.
It is easy to excuse paying taxes.
The issue that that taxes fundamentally bind two moralities: and individual and social one.
Societies generally thrive better when there is a certain level of equality. Not a hundred percent, but enough for social mobility and for people to be aspirational.
No or low taxes remove that opportunity. It bears people from taking an education and forces them in poverty.
Progressive taxation on income is specifically designed to prevent upward mobility from working.
This is totally true, if you ignore the entire history of taxation in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Taxes are a part of a broader redistributive system.
Mobility is given by ensuring that all have equal opportunity. Opportunity to learn, opportunity to start a business. Etc.
The dilemma we're battling with here is the morality of avoiding most of your taxes if you can afford to hire the right people to manage your money.
Would it still be justified if we replaced "taxes" with "judgement in the afterlife"?
Big corporations don't pay taxes the same way as regular folks' businesses. Here in the UK the tax rates are _negotiated_ for the big guys. The system is entirely opaque and invites corruption.
You're acting like the game is fair. The game is heavily rigged to favor large companies. This is by design.
Most small businesses are pass through entities in the United States and pay no corporate taxes at all so it's certainly not the case that "The game is heavily rigged to favor large companies."
Meta is a company created in the last 20 years or so. You can make more big companies if you don't make it really difficult to do so.
"Why don't most people simply create billion-dollar companies so they can also benefit from tax benefits you can only capture at scale? As long as we make it easy to create billion-dollar companies this should work."
To the extent that this is even true it appears to be caused by three things: stock option compensation accounting, R&D deductions and bonus depreciation.
Stock option compensation rules have been a boon because Meta stock has risen 6x in three years. It's unlikely to do that again. My understanding is that this is symmetrical so if the stock trends down we will see an inflated effective tax rate for Meta.
Recent R&D rule changes allowing software engineering salaries for R&D to be written off seem reasonable and were quite popular on Hacker News. Previously these expenses were amortized over five years so this just pulls it forward. Subsequents years will see depressed expenses.
Bonus depreciation is once again just pulling forward legitimate expenses earlier than before. At worst they are just delaying giving the government its taxes and the corporations gain a few points of interest in between.
All of the tax rules used here are open to debate but none seem obviously wrong or nefarious. This is why people like Reich choose to keep things vague. Corporations brazenly stealing from your pocket is much more interesting than the mundane reality.
Can someone make a startup that allows me to do this as an individual?
Join Bluesky and you too can lie about whatever you want.
It's called a "farm" (note the quotes). You may need a few acres of very cheap rural land, and some chickens. The IRS loves chickens
> The IRS loves chickens
Or even just bees: https://mountainsweethoney.com/state-guide-for-beekeeper-tax...
Join that startup as a founder, have a million+ exit and you will have the capability to do this as an individual.
Don't be poor, got it.
Good life advice in general really.
Don't know why so many people are so stupid they don't follow such simple and sensible advice. /s
Effective exit rate tax is around 24%
You can make stuff up even on this site.
You don't need a startup. Millions of people have an effective tax rate that is 0% and they have a net tax rate that is negative. They do this simply by having no meaningful skills or knowledge.
Individual Meta employees and shareholders couldn't do this either.
But they can. Any Meta employee or shareholder is also free to go on Bluesky and tell lies about taxes.
Unless he links directly to evidence that backs up what he says, I’ve learned to tune out Robert Reich.
For a guy who is a Rhodes Scholar, a college professor, and a former Secretary of Labor he has a remarkable tendency to leave out qualifying context when making these statements.
He’s smart enough to formulate arguments with the appropriate context and still make it accessible to the general public - but he consistently chooses not to.
A few weeks ago he was trying to compare the “millionaire tax” of my home state of Massachusetts, with the proposed California wealth tax as evidence that the California tax would not cause flight of wealthy taxpayers:
https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/videos/what-really-happens-...
Never once did he mention that the Massachusetts tax is a bog standard conventional tax on income, compared to this new concept of a global total wealth tax.
Lies, damned lies and statistics. They are fudging statistics so they arent technically lying but leave out context and stretch definitions to make their point.
Being pro businesses, it's only available for big corporations because as a self-employed, it's close to 30%.
I'm SE and there are quite a few tax breaks available, especially if you structure as a S-Corp. The hard part is figuring out what all tax breaks are available as they're constantly changing, like last year you can deduct dental insurance premiums.
I still pay an eye watering amount, and being SE shows you the brutality of the system (estimated taxes are insane, especially the payment schedule for them when you're NET 30/60).
> estimated taxes are insane, especially the payment schedule for them when you're NET 30/60
Total layman understanding here, but can you not do cash basis plus schedule AI?
Kinda, for Q2 and Q3 you're expected to pay the full amount for the quarter about a month or so before it ends. So it's less the accounting method kinda and more I haven't been paid for a month that I already owe taxes for.
The periods aren't quite quarterly though. "Q2" ends on 5/31 and tax due 6/15, "Q3" ends on 8/31 and tax due 9/15. IIUC.
(I'm certainly not trying to argue that doing taxes 5 times a year isn't fucking onerous, though!)
> it's only available for big corporations because as a self-employed, it's close to 30%.
Well maybe instead of complaining you should simply just generate more economic value. If Meta disappeared tomorrow it would hit the US economy, if you disappeared tomorrow it wouldn’t even be noticeable in the stock market.
Sorry that’s a horrible take. Basically you are embracing “too big to fail”.
It’s more like “might makes right” I think, and it’s not really me embracing it, as much as realizing this is the ideology of our ruling elites and they aren’t afraid to be frank about it anymore.
There are good arguments for making he corporate tax rate 0%.
I wonder if tax returns of corporations could be made public data.
It could but then it would show that the effective tax was not 30% but 3% and there is a strong lobby in Washington against that.
You think public companies are just lying in their audited financial statements?
No, I think both of the following statements can be true at the same time:
1. The audited financial statement meets all requirements and is accurate according to the relevant definitions, stating that the effective federal tax rate is 30%.
2. They pay an effective federal tax rate of 3%.
I don't think those statements can be true at the same time, without significant qualifications on (2) in a way that make it meaningless. Certainly not the reasonable straightforward reading of the phrase.
Maybe you are right, but maybe the significant qualifications are on (1) in a way that make it meaningless.
There is a reason why large companies have entire departments dedicated to identifying and utilizing every available national and international tax loophole, all while working to maintain a positive public image.
individuals should be able to take advantage of the same tax rules as corporations.
> individuals should be able to take advantage of the same tax rules as corporations.
Nah, corporations should be taxed at the same rate as individuals. A country where everyone pays only 3% tax is going to be a crap hole.
The state would go bankrupt within a month or so.
Well, we need taxes to have a functioning economy. So what is really needed is that we close loopholes that allow corporations to pay less than individuals
Taxes is a net benefit (at least here in Europe): you basically get better services (that you would pay anyway) for much cheaper: education, healthcare, culture, etc
I mean you can. If you read the actual article:
https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/
You just have to buy of equipment used for a business purpose that you can depreciate. You then put these on Form 4562 or something.
This is a bit tongue in cheek. The American tax system is set up to tax at the point of consumption. There'd be no difference in how much money actually ended up in your hand if we switched everything over to a VAT, except a lot of people would probably be relieved of the psychological burden of taxes.
Reich is just lying. This isn't a headline and isn't substantiated.
IIUC Meta is spending more on capital (due to AI buildout) than they are receiving in profits.
Given Depreciation this is expected. And ... the intent of the law, to prompt capital investment.
What's the scandal, exactly?
Wait it gets worse for the "article"
ITEP gets the number by dividing Meta’s current federal tax expense ($2.82B) by its domestic pretax income ($79.64B), which is about 3.5–3.6%.
But Meta’s total 2025 GAAP effective tax rate was actually 29.6%, because it also booked a huge $15.93B charge tied to the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax and valuation allowances.
Both numbers are wrong. Meta's actual income before tax was about $83 billion and its actual tax cost was $25 billion. This is an effective tax rate of ~30%.
https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
> Trickle-down economics isn't just a hoax, it's corrosive to democracy.
It's a hoax in that it's a straw man that no one advocates for.
Perhaps, but the entire ecosystem of associated buzzwords/ideas is pretty popular in our culture today: "job creator" C-suite executives magically "create" jobs and/or raise pay because their budget for taxes goes down and they just don't know where else to put the cash, thus everyone benefits. Is it a straw man? Sure. Is it the same pablum often delivered by the evening news and politicians? Yes. Is reality a TON more complicated and often counter-intuitive? Yep. (Raising wages doesn't seem to have a _direct_ correlation to inflation, it's correlated but often lagging and muted in response; job creation seems to be mostly a market effect not corporate decision; the modern definition of "fiduciary duty" means extra cash should go toward immediate stockholder benefit so stock buybacks are always FAR more likely than employee benefits; etc; etc).
The one area I'd push back strong on is that nobody is "advocating" for it. Many stockholding orgs/individuals are. They don't care if its a straw man, they know what the real-world systemic effects are of lower taxation rates.
You may read "supply-side economics" instead.
The current admin sure does seem to push for it
I'm actually surprised it's that high?
By the angle at which, say, Zuckerberg and Bezos bent over for Trump ... I thought they'd be well into negative taxes by now.
Conventional conservative/capitalist wisdom is that corporations "don't pay taxes" because they just "pass it along to consumers as higher prices". That's why the juxtaposition here, that they are spending tens of millions to influence elections, is important. If corporations were just efficient market operators that moved goods and services, why so much lobbying? It's because the rich owners of corporations realized that with a small tweak, which we know retroactively as "Citizens United vs FEC", they could harness their corporate ownership to control the political, social, and governance landscape of the world.
> Conventional conservative/capitalist wisdom is that corporations "don't pay taxes" because they just "pass it along to consumers as higher prices".
I'm with you, but a couple things: 1) Do you mean "shouldn't pay taxes"? Because I'm pretty sure their thing is getting corporations (and the wealthy) to pay less taxes than they already do. 2) That's not wisdom, it's a propaganda-meme. It's a misleading little story (mainly through omission) meant to get people to support a policy that's bad for them.
a shamefully low amount.
I sometimes wonder how much net negative for humanity this company is. From the big players probably one of the worst.
It’s starting to feel almost hilarious how much of comically evil villains they are.
I picture them as Robbie Rotten from LazyTown.
https://characterprofile.fandom.com/wiki/Robbie_Rotten
Maybe it’s just more visible now but it seems like these companies are really accelerating in their evil lately. Probably because they know this admin’s going to do jack shit to protect people. Would be funny if it wasn’t also so scary.
> Maybe it’s just more visible now but it seems like these companies are really accelerating in their evil lately.
Well I mean they have no incentive to behave any other way, if anything they are rewarded via the shareholders. Number goes up when they perform mass layoffs. That tells you everything you need to know.
I have the same observation. Not really sure what is the driver.
Unchecked power deteriorates empathy as classes drift further apart — an inevitability of un(der)regulated capitalism driving unprecedented inequality. This accelerates when the billionaire class seizes the levers of power and dismantle entire regulatory bodies like the Epstein class has done with the US government.