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They don't distribute profits to their members.

The only thing making them pay tax will do is create an accounting nuisance where they drive profits and thus taxes to zero.



And how will they do that? You can’t just “drive profits to zero by accounting nuisances”. Otherwise every for profit organization would do that.

(Although, separately, this is what IKEA does but they setup an extremely intricate multinational structure to achieve this, and this is what Amazon does, but that required heavy re-investment which only worked because the markets trusted the reinvestment would eventually be profitable and therefore invested in AMZN despite it not showing profits).

They’d have to do it by paying salaries or buying products, etc all of which are also taxed, and usually at rates higher than taxes on profits.


I read things like this though:

"In each year from 2014 to 2018, about half of all large corporations had no federal income tax liability."

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105384-highlights.pdf


Yes but there are plenty of ways to do that with R&D, capital write-offs, “business expenses”, reinvestment, etc . I don’t think there are nearly that many for charities and other nonprofits. https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0512/how-large-c...


The reason for-profit companies don't "drive profits to zero" is that the shareholders would eventually notice and complain.

There are some technical for-profit companies that effectively drive profit to zero and the shareholders don't care, because that was the purpose.


Amazon famously had negative profits for years as they spent on building out their infrastructure.


Amazon did not consistently lose money. They were basically breaking even since the early 2000s and they proved they could turn on the profit faucet anytime they want once AWS came around. Although, they still heavily invest in infrastructure development, hence the continued low profit margins.

https://www.stock-analysis-on.net/NASDAQ/Company/Amazoncom-I...

See Amazon v Walmart net profit margin 1999 to 2018 graph.

https://mgmresearch.com/amazon-vs-walmart-revenues-and-profi...


You answered your own question, they just spend more money.

How does non profits spending money inefficiently to burn revenue help society?


If they drove profits to zero by distributing it to their members, wouldn't that incur income tax?


Wrong. If they're not 501(c)(3) then donations to them are not tax-deductible.




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