Tesla Paid Zero Federal Income Tax in 2024, Despite $2.3 Billion in Income.
This brings Tesla’s average tax rate over the past three years to 0.4 percent.
Just a symptom of why the US has budget issues constantly every year.
Companies that can afford to pay taxes with absolutely zero negative impact to operations instead get a free ride. Meanwhile most individuals pay half their income to taxes and half the country lives paycheck to paycheck.
But when that sweet sweet money starts trickling down…
Any year now…
Any decade now...
I always like to point out that the billionaire tax cut only encouraged companies like this to give higher bonuses to their already rich executives and taking money away from their employees. I’m no accountant, but I’m willing to bet those bonuses factor in to how little taxes the corporation pays.
You want money to trickle down? Tax the executives 70% over $10 million of income. Either the company will take a profit and pay taxes, pay their executive bonuses and the majority will just go to taxes (and the executive will still be filthy fucking rich), OR they will increase how much the bottom earners get who will be paying a much lower amount in taxes.
You know what would help this? Putting another face on Mount Rushmore and renaming bodies of water.
It would be so awesome if I could deduct food, housing, and utilities from my income for tax purposes.
I think you can, but most people take the standard deduction every year (which is supposed to represent these things) rather than calculate the itemized deduction with receipts.
I’ve itemized a bunch of times and you were pretty limited in what you could deduct. If you have a mortgage you can deduct the interest but not the payments. And before 2020 you deduct a portion of your household expenses if you had a home office.
But to a business those are all operating expenses and businesses only pay tax on profits.
I’m presuming you do your own taxes in your country, cause here you only can if you’re self employed, and you use your home for something like an office, I think.
Because due to fancy accounting they haven't made a profit? Reminds me of how movie studios can make even the most successful movies unprofitable on paper to get out of profit sharing deals.
Can't wait until next year! "Tesla received 600 million, after tax payments of $0, despite $3 billion in income, 2/3rds of which were also from the federal government."
Socialism for big corporations. Privatized profits. Socialized losses for everyone else.
The ITEP report cited by the article calls out the fact Tesla uses the accelerated method of depreciation and amortization instead of the straight line method. This means instead of depreciating an equal amount every year over the course of a machine's life, they are weighting these expenses more heavily in the near term in exchange for a lower expense (read: lower tax deduction) down the road. This Investopedia article explains it in more detail for those who care to learn more.
The ITEP report calls out other tax credits as well, such as carrying forward net operating losses from previous years. For anyone who cares, the full details are in their 2024 10-K filing. Open up the document, do a Ctrl+F search for "Note 13 – Income Taxes" and look at the tables on pages 80 through 82. I admit that there are several line items that I do not understand. I plugged them into Perplexity AI and asked it to explain them in layman's terms. My brain's too fried at this point, but I'll leave the link to that explanation here (again, in case anyone out there cares to learn more).
Trump wants to lower corp taxes even more. So they'll become negative?
Or: how Democrats funded Trump.
