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Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

businessinsider.com.au

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Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#111

Post by rjbwork »

thisCtx wrote: post #85
IdontRememberIt wrote: post #67

If IP and shell companies infuriate you. I invite you to investigate why all billionaires have foundations or its cousin structures and "give" their wealth to it... Clue: tax and inheritance (tax) avoidance. Bill, Buffett, etc. are hypocrites. But it is not new, even in the Bible they spoke about it (Matthew 6:2): "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues…

IMO most of the “exceptional” people in a country “by of and for the people” are hypocrites for waiting on billionaires to fix things How is political capitulation by the masses exceptional? Covid offered a perfect opportunity for info workers to show solidarity with on-site workers by not opening those laptops at home. But really it’s the leopards fault they keep eating our faces because we refuse to build a cage (h…

>Stop going to the jobs they offer. It’s our agency not theirs. Demand they respect it.

A general strike? You're asking for people to cooperate in a mass prisoner dilemma on a societal scale. Never going to happen with the complete lack of labor organization in the US.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#112

Post by seaourfreed »

samename wrote: post #94
seaourfreed wrote: post #93

Congress is corrupt (via lobbyists). Congress would make this illegal if congress men/women didn't sell out American Citizens. 88% of the cost of the US Fed gov is paid for by taxes by workers (income taxes). Less than 12% comes from all corp/business taxes combined with capital gains (taxing the rich 1%). Business shifting tax burden to workers is a massive scale problem. $3.5 Trillion = US Tax Revenues (2019) and 8…

Do you have a source for these stats?

Yes. They come straight from US Congressional Budget Office. These are government published numbers:

US Federal Tax Revenues (2019): $3.5 Trillion

SOURCE: https://www.google.com/search?q=us+tax+revenues+2019&oq=us+t...

US Capital Gains (2018): $170 Billion (4.8%)

SOURCE: https://taxfoundation.org/federal-capital-gains-tax-collecti...

US Corporate Taxes: 3.9% of US Tax Revenues

https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-2021/#:~:text=Corpo....

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#113

Post by tryonenow »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #107
IdontRememberIt wrote: post #67

If IP and shell companies infuriate you. I invite you to investigate why all billionaires have foundations or its cousin structures and "give" their wealth to it... Clue: tax and inheritance (tax) avoidance. Bill, Buffett, etc. are hypocrites. But it is not new, even in the Bible they spoke about it (Matthew 6:2): "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues…

Your point is valid without the need to reference fiction. Please don't pollute HN with this rhetoric.

You don't need to be religious to recognize that there is occasional wisdom in the bible.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#114

Post by rsj_hn »

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #95
IdontRememberIt wrote: post #67

If IP and shell companies infuriate you. I invite you to investigate why all billionaires have foundations or its cousin structures and "give" their wealth to it... Clue: tax and inheritance (tax) avoidance. Bill, Buffett, etc. are hypocrites. But it is not new, even in the Bible they spoke about it (Matthew 6:2): "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues…

How would someone at that level of wealth give in a more empathetic way? What should Bill and Buffett be doing instead?

If SpaceX can reduce launch costs, we need one of these uber billionaires to launch rockets with some kind of exploding black powder to create a dot-matrix picture of themselves on the moon.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#115

Post by lifeformed »

IdontRememberIt wrote: post #67

If IP and shell companies infuriate you. I invite you to investigate why all billionaires have foundations or its cousin structures and "give" their wealth to it... Clue: tax and inheritance (tax) avoidance. Bill, Buffett, etc. are hypocrites. But it is not new, even in the Bible they spoke about it (Matthew 6:2): "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues…

You could reframe it as:

The tax benefits are there to incentivize philanthropic giving. Society benefits from their giving and they receive a tax benefit and PR boost in return. It's not like they're saving more money total by giving it away. And sure, it'd be nice if philanthropists were super humble and anonymous, but the money helps either way, and I don't think those who are helped by the giving care if the givers have a statue of themselves up somewhere.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#116

Post by dheera »

varenc wrote: post #104
dheera wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone create a Dutch-shell-companies-as-as-service (DSCaaS), generate and submit all legal documents automatically, and help normal citizens dodge the same amount of taxes?

I suspect there's a large fixed cost to arrange this so it doesn't make sense for most people. Though maybe there's way to make it cheaper! Also with inheritance tax in the US, your estate isn't taxed unless it's worth more than $11.18 million [0]. So doesn't matter for most people. It's estimated only %0.2 of estates pay the tax. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State...

I suppose a lot of the fixed costs are lawyers charging $1000/hour to fill in some blanks on some Word templates?

Maybe an entrepreneur just needs to make that a web form. Fill in details and generate the same form for $10 instead of $1000.

And then some robots to print, seal up, and mail the envelopes and we're done.

I should be able to spin up a Dutch shell company like an EC2 instance. Maybe have "AWS" regions for Cayman and other places too and a Python API to spin up shell companies in arbitrary locales.

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#117

Post by bartart »

seaourfreed wrote: post #93

Congress is corrupt (via lobbyists). Congress would make this illegal if congress men/women didn't sell out American Citizens. 88% of the cost of the US Fed gov is paid for by taxes by workers (income taxes). Less than 12% comes from all corp/business taxes combined with capital gains (taxing the rich 1%). Business shifting tax burden to workers is a massive scale problem. $3.5 Trillion = US Tax Revenues (2019) and 8…

It's also worth noting that the top 1% pay about 40% of all income taxes at the federal level, and they earn about 20% of annual income from all sources (http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/186106). So classifying 88% of federal revenue as paid by regular workers might be a bit misleading

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#118

Post by IdontRememberIt »

dheera wrote: post #99
IdontRememberIt wrote: post #67

If IP and shell companies infuriate you. I invite you to investigate why all billionaires have foundations or its cousin structures and "give" their wealth to it... Clue: tax and inheritance (tax) avoidance. Bill, Buffett, etc. are hypocrites. But it is not new, even in the Bible they spoke about it (Matthew 6:2): "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues…

Can someone create a Dutch-shell-companies-as-as-service (DSCaaS), generate and submit all legal documents automatically, and help normal citizens dodge the same amount of taxes?

Forget it. Tax offices are chasing the big fishes so they have all the tools to catch and bother the small inexperienced ones. Also running these structure is actually very expensive and complex. Normal citizen have only 2 possibilities: cash economy or move to place fiscally more adapted to their needs (each country favor a type of fiscal profil).

Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue

#119

Post by fnord77 »

seaourfreed wrote: post #93

Congress is corrupt (via lobbyists). Congress would make this illegal if congress men/women didn't sell out American Citizens. 88% of the cost of the US Fed gov is paid for by taxes by workers (income taxes). Less than 12% comes from all corp/business taxes combined with capital gains (taxing the rich 1%). Business shifting tax burden to workers is a massive scale problem. $3.5 Trillion = US Tax Revenues (2019) and 8…

in the 1950s and later, the highest tax bracket was somewhere in the 90%s
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