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.

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

I think it's from this: https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/

  - Accurate / favorable
  - Inaccurate / favorable
  - Accurate / unfavorable
  - Inaccurate / unfavorable

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!)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

Join that startup as a founder, have a million+ exit and you will have the capability to do this as an individual.

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.

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).

> 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 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.

> 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.

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.

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

> 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.