Honestly it’s hard to blame companies for doing this. When all your competitors are doing it, you would be putting yourself at a distinct disadvantage by paying more taxes.
Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue
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Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
99% of the top 1% are "normal workers" like me - engineers at Google - or my cousin - a radiologist - or one of my best friends - an investment banker - or lawyers, or owners of successful small businesses, etc... These "normal workers" pay a lot of that 40% of the tax bill. There aren't that many CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and board members, A+ list celebrities, and aristocrats. You're getting into the .01% - tha…
Is this satire?
I mean, you’re pointing your finger at the And I love the call out about your everyday working schmuck cousin, you know, the radiologist, who is in one of the highest paid professions and if he’s in the US is likely making close to $500,000 per year. Almost 10x the median US salary.
https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/radiologist...
Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue
#273Congress 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…
Actually the EU would have to act here. The EU should ensure that revenues made in the EU are taxed in the EU. However that would require all member states to agree and for countries like Ireland or Netherlands it is better to earn 1% of all EU profits of those companies than "proper" tax rates on only parts of the revenue, thus they won't agree ...
To be fair to Ireland it also would require other countries drop the hidden advantages to business that countries grant to gain unfair advantage.
Germany blocking regulation of car emissions and it's control/manipulation of the Euro to ensure its advantage, France's support to state industries and use of its intelligence services to gain competitive business contracts, the US subsidising research through military investment, Delaware Corps, Swiss banks being Swiss banks, Scandinavian companies using bribes, various favoured semi-state companies in Eastern Europe with suspiciously tight political connections, Israel using state resources and insider access for trusted businesses, Korean State lead industry, Chinas intellectual property theft, Italy and Greece's lack of tax collection, Dutch taxes, Malta's money laundering, the UK using Trusts, the Island of Man and BVI to allow companies manipulate tax but keeping it at an arm's length, UKs revolving door between intelligence/gov/banking, the UK letting dodgy money wash through London.
Ireland is one of the worse on the corporate tax but in many ways we are just a rocky previously poor outcrop that has found a way to be competitive openly. Many others do unfair things in more hidden ways and everything needs to be on the table.
Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
99% of the top 1% are "normal workers" like me - engineers at Google - or my cousin - a radiologist - or one of my best friends - an investment banker - or lawyers, or owners of successful small businesses, etc... These "normal workers" pay a lot of that 40% of the tax bill. There aren't that many CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and board members, A+ list celebrities, and aristocrats. You're getting into the .01% - tha…
That article is saying top 1% income in the US is numbers higher than $400k! The median was something like $50k or $80k last time I checked. Those aren't normal workers, those are exactly there sort of people who are seen as not contributing their fair share. They physically can't be working harder than a median worker but they're getting multiples of the salary. If someone is going to be supporting society, they are…
The people who have the means have the means because society supports them.
Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess people think having US citizenship is worth the price of filing extra taxes - otherwise they would renounce the citizenship. It costs money to maintain the meaning of a citizenship. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask people to pay for it.
It’s actually rather difficult and costly to renounce citizenship —- you must pay for that privilege. The passport fee should be more than enough (as it is for literally every other country), especially for a passport that barely cracks the top 20 to top 10 in various indices of passport strength. We are being exploited and there’s really no good reason.
> The passport fee should be more than enough (as it is for literally every other country)
The US does have an extremely good network of embassies, and the US is also probably the most effective country on earth at being able to evacuate their citizens from areas that turn hostile.
And of course... a passport is nothing without the state to back it up. That requires more funding than just a passport fee.
Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I expect (well, I don't expect, but I WANT) my government to stop it from happening. It's foolish to expect people who are in a position of responsibility _to their shareholders_ to act like they're responsible _to you_. They're not. Close the loopholes, raise the taxes (wealth, cap gains, high-earner income, corporate, etc) and stop vilifying people for making money.
Becoming a CEO does not magically make your responsibility to society disappear. Shareholders are an additional thing you need to worry about, not the only thing. > stop vilifying people for making money Why? They're doing it in a vile way.
I'll put it a different way. Most people don't see issues with that, they see issues with shit legislation. You want an effective method? Provide a negative incentive to correct that. Its far more effective to do that.
Talking about how we should get them to change their morality may give us the feel goods, but that's about all it'll do.
Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
The core claim above is that ultimately the foundation is a lip service activity to preserve wealth. If a hundred billionaire pays out 1 billion dollars in philanthropy via the foundation, but earns 10 billion tax free then they are doing quite well. It's a trivial matter to write the terms of the foundation such that yourself/successors can draw permanent income via "board" positions, advisory roles, or other means.
How would that work exactly? Genuine question, I've never understood how donating saves on taxes, you have to pay at some point to access the money, no?
In theory, you could donate to a charitable org you control, live on its properties, travel for "business" reasons, so on and so forth tax free.
There's also the unfortunately more common interpretation I see on reddit where somehow people believe that tax deductions are generally greater than the donated amount
Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe revenue laundering using borrowed credit? I wouldn't be surprised if some day we discover that many corporations the tech space have been engaged in some kind of global credit laundering scheme using shell companies as a filter to systematically separate credit from debt in order to generate artificial revenue for big tech corporations... Money extracted straight from the big banks. They should refer to this sc…
What kind of bank makes business loans without encumbering any collateral?
Why not just create intangible collateral out of thin air? E.g. crypto? Then you just use some of the credit to pump up the value of the collateral to meet the bank's expectation.
Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue
#279> Uber transfered its intellectual property through a $16 billion “loan” from one of its subsidiaries in Singapore that in turn owns one of Uber’s Dutch shell companies, a manuever that grants the company a $1 billion tax break every year for the next 20 years, the researchers found. Shit like this makes my head hurt and infuriates me at the same time.
I've taken to calling it anti-American (or anti-whatever country in which they're minimizing their taxes). How better to tell the world that you don't care about the societies that made your success possible than to refuse to help fund them?
Well it's not only a matter of helping countries, but funding the civilisation infrastructure that allows businesses to operate and turn a profit in the first place.
In the case of Uber, there wouldn't be much business without roads
Re: Uber used 50 Dutch shell companies to dodge taxes on $6B in revenue
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
One: this seems to be about uber activities outside the US Two: the US is actively working on what it is calling a global minimum corporate tax Three: anonymous shell companies were made illegal in the US in January It seems your comment is rather uninformed. There is of course much to do but it is hard to look at what is happening and come to the conclusion that it is all nothing
> this seems to be about uber activities outside the US Wrong. This is Uber transferring money all around the world through shell companies so it's hard to figure out where it came from. Just like a crypto-mixer. This quote alone shows how they initially transferred a good chunk of money out of the US: Uber transferred its intellectual property through a $16 billion “loan” from one of its subsidiaries in Singapore th…
> Never gonna happen. The govt's collection of federal taxes within the US is already technically illegal
Your reasoning for why it's not going to happen is that something that shouldn't be happening, actually is?