301–310 of 333 posts
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Net income for 2019 was ~18 milliards (or billions for you Americans) so it's half of that!
All English-speaking countries have adopted the short scale. Since we're not using French, it's 18 billion. Or you could follow SI recommendations and say 18G$. Pretty sure this crowd would know what you mean.
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You can make a good argument* that taxing corporations is weird anyway, since they're abstract legal concepts. Taxing the income real people get paid from the corporation would be the logical, and much simpler system. * You can of course also make a decent argument against this :)
Corporations have similar legal rights to corporeal persons. Freedom of speech, access to the legal system, etc. As a result of having similar rights, they should be taxed as corporeal persons. It is not rocket science to conclude that corporations in the U.S. should be taxed at the same effective tax rate as real persons.
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"If I understand right, US citizens only owe income tax if what they already paid is less than the US rate." I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that unless there's a tax treaty specifying otherwise (which we do have with many countries), all personal income over the "foreign earned income exclusion" (roughly 100k) is subject to income tax just like US-derived income would be. (Edit: just saw your edit about F…
I'm not sure it's so easy. If you own 51% of a company, which owns a slice of a company, which does business in America, does this grant uncle same the right to collect 5% of your profits? Sounds pretty imperial. Here's another idea though: Arrange things so that the taxes owed depend on the goods sold, not on any ownership structure. Don't sell goods in the US? No problem. Sell mostly in the US? Who cares about your…
Well, you run into that kind of issue when you allow spontaneous incorporation. If anything, incorporation should likely be handled a bit more like immigration in the sense you recognize an entity incorporated somewhere else instead of whipping up a brand new separate legal fiction, Company X,.
This would create a mechanism through which issues of taxation could be resolved through tracing the "heritage" of a corporation, then leaving the divvy up of tax extracted value to be sorted out by internation tax agreement.
It certainly sets up a pleasing symmetry in process between dealing with Corporations and people by my estimation, and cuts down on the attractiveness of creating corporate hierarchies with the direct intent to play shell games with your taxes.
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Then you'd be judging a lot of people wrongly, because that sort of thing happens all the time for entirely legitimate reasons. For example, at various points there have been federal tax credits for installing solar panels on your house or buying certain types of green cars. For a lot of people the credit would exceed their federal tax liability for the year. You're prepared to send them all to jail for that without…
Those are not "weird tricks". Those are tax incentives whose intent is obvious (make the environment better) and where your friend's using the tax incentive directly aligns with why that tax rule is there. Your friend and the tax law are clearly doing what they are clearly designed to do, which benefits not just him but us all. However, if your friend's "weird trick" is something like a double Irish [1], then it's no…
As we know the mortgage interest tax deduction was intended to promote home ownership. A lot of people who would have bought a home anyway then go out and take a bigger home loan in order to use the money they would have put down as principal to e.g. buy a car. The tax provision clearly wasn't intended to promote car ownership, so all of those people should be in jail, right?
> However, if your friend's "weird trick" is something like a double Irish [1], then it's not at all clear that the applicable tax laws are intended to be used that way or that your friend's choice to use that loophole is good for anyone but your friend.
Being not at all clear is the circumstance where you most have to look at the details, not where you get to ignore them based on whether you like the accused.
Money is fungible. International profit doesn't have a clearly defined jurisdiction. This isn't trivial. "Do what I meant not what I said" is a cop out. If you want better tax laws, change them instead of pretending the existing ones aren't what they are.
But governments don't actually want to do that, because if you had clear tax laws that caused international corporations to pay more tax for operating in your jurisdiction, that would give them a major financial incentive to move somewhere else. Everybody wants to eat their cake and have it too. Pass laws that let corporations avoid your high nominal tax rates which makes them stay in your country, then get offended when they use them.
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If you think this is something new, please read some history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_pardons_in_the_Unite...
I’m well aware of the history. What’s new is the President’s newfound knowledge that his corruption has no consequences.
Just to throw you a bone, you'll notice that AG Barr was involved in the pardons resulting from the Iran Contra affair as well.
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All English-speaking countries have adopted the short scale. Since we're not using French, it's 18 billion. Or you could follow SI recommendations and say 18G$. Pretty sure this crowd would know what you mean.
I should stop making jokes on this site :p
Doesn't almost every multinational use this arrangement, commonly known as the Double Irish? Why is Facebook getting called out specifically? Surprised the article doesn't mention this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement#Multi...
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Been in both situations and did a lot of research on what was possible negotiating. There is public information out there which they try to suppress (imagine if the public knew that the guy who owed 10 mill, got away paying 5 mill after years of not paying anything even after the IRS marked them).
Can you point me to the dat? Sounds like a fascinating dataset.
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Corporations have similar legal rights to corporeal persons. Freedom of speech, access to the legal system, etc. As a result of having similar rights, they should be taxed as corporeal persons. It is not rocket science to conclude that corporations in the U.S. should be taxed at the same effective tax rate as real persons.
Corporations just tax their profit. Persons have to tax all their income (with minimal exceptions). How is that fair?
Humans, on the other hand, all work mostly the same.