It’s all the rage — at least for now, until the next hot little stock. But, you know, Twitter may seem real edgy, or new, or hip — but when it comes to corporate responsibility, it’s the same old story. Tax loopholes galore!
From Apple down the line through every major corporation and certainly those in the tech industry, it’s just part of doing business to figure out how to fleece the American taxpayer. Twitter is no different in a whole list of tech companies who are using tax law to skirt paying their fair share, per the Citizens for Tax Justice:
–Twitter has $107 million of unused stock option deductions—meaning that the next $107 million the company earns could be tax-free as a result of this single tax break. (Since the company has not yet reported a profitable year in the US, it’s impossible to estimate how long it will take the company to earn this amount going forward.)
How?
Most big corporations give their executives (and sometimes other employees) options to buy the company’s stock at a favorable price in the future. When those options are exercised, corporations can take a tax deduction for the difference between what the employees pay for the stock and what it’s worth (while employees report this difference as taxable wages). But unlike the wages earned by most employees, the stock options granted to executives don’t result in a dollar-for-dollar cash outlay by corporations—so the case for allowing companies to deduct stock option “expense” as a cost of doing business is weak.
Of course, in the breathless excitement and debate about how high Twitter’s stock will go and how much people will make, you’ll never see the dark side reported in the media. Nah. No one wants to spoil the party — at least the party that the elites always are having no matter how grotesque the outcome might be for the rest of us.
