"obviously" : I guess that has a secret meaning not available to normal humans.
Say what you actually mean, not some wild misstatement.
Edit: this is no different from clickbait. I could say "80% of women get raped in college" and get attention; then when it's called out say, "but it's still a big problem!"
I'm with you. Half the time that I dismiss someone's statement as just hyperbole or a figure of speech, I later find out they were serious and seriously misinformed.
I'd say it's probably 50/50 odds someone saying "Google doesn't pay taxes" literally believes that the sum of Google's corporate income, employment, real estate, etc. tax payments around the world last year was less than their personal income, social security, and property tax payments.
It's also astounding how many people think a tax write-off of $1 million reduces corporate taxes by $1 million rather than reducing the taxable profits by $1 million. Granted, there are some really astounding tax loopholes out there, but a scary percentage of people think mega-corporations literally pay less than they do in total taxes.
It reminds me of the time I was joking around with a girl I was dating at the time about stress headache "brain muscle cramps". 5 minutes into joking around, I realized she thought "Your brain is a muscle, you need to exercise it" was literal, and concentrating hard would sometimes cause the "brain muscle" to cramp up. She was a grad student in Environmental Engineering at MIT at the time. That triggered a brief argument over whether the brain was primarily muscle tissue or primarily nerve tissue.
There are also a ton of people who think they aren't among those who don't pay any federal income tax because they see the Social Security tax line on their W-2 forms.
> There are also a ton of people who think they aren't among those who don't pay any federal income tax because they see the Social Security tax line on their W-2 forms.
(rephrased) There are a ton of people who think that they pay some federal income tax because they see the Social Security tax line on their W-2 forms.
Sorry, I'm not normally one to call out double negatives. My brain just does not want to make sense of the provided sentence. Did you mean despite or because in the context of the Social Security line item? I would have thought despite but that actually changes the meaning of the sentence.
People hear that 57% of households paid no federal income tax. They look at their own W-2s and see their combined Social Security tax and income tax withholding payments exceed their tax refund, and believe they've paid income tax.
There are quite a few people who believe they pay federal income tax who don't. They do pay some taxes that come out of every paycheck, but they don't (in net) pay federal income tax.
"no taxes" here was obviously used in the sense of "not enough taxes". Also, reading a 10-K cannot answer whether a company has paid "enough" taxes.
The question of how much is enough is difficult, given how complicated international tax law is, and how legal != ethical/good for society. E.g. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/google-used-d....