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Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

theguardian.com

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Re: Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

#341

Post by fallingknife »

nivenkos wrote: post #234
fallingknife wrote: post #12

Why can't governments learn that taxing corporations is pointless? The same revenue is can be raised more simply through sales tax and personal income tax on salaries and distributions.

That punishes working people just for working! How are you meant to afford a house and stuff with taxes like that? We need wealth tax - go after the shareholders and landowners, who don't directly create value and dodge a lot of tax.

You buy $10K of DOGE at $0.0001 in 12-1-2020 and it goes to $0.10 on 12-31. You now have $10MM in wealth, and will, owe $500K to the government. DOGE goes back down to $0.0001 on 1-1. Now you owe $500K of taxes and have $10K of assets. "But you should just sell 5% on 12-31 and you will have enough to pay taxes" you say. Yeah, you and everyone else who needs to pay wealth tax. Know what it looks like when everybody sells at the same time? 2008 or 1929. Wealth tax is dumb.

Re: Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

#342

Post by dalbasal »

TimPC wrote: post #263
dalbasal wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely easy to speculate about this stuff academically. Economists tend to delight in theory-adjacent discussions. These have very little bearing on the real world. TRW, in this case, is a cascading infinity of corporate law, tax law, accounting practices, jurisdictions, lobbyists, parliaments and special interests. None of these exist in economist's models, unless they're modeling public choice theory or som…

Capital gains is far less gameable because there isn’t a mechanism to move your capital gains to a different tax region as an individual. Corporations may be able to game capital gains slightly when they hold shares in other corporations but that is very minor compared to corporate tax games that go on now.

It is, but it's also more politically explosive. The upshot is that CGT loopholes are extremely prevalent.

Both succeed/fail in the same way, marking to market. Apple Inc, the publicly traded entity, is able to deny its income for tax purposes (they say they paid this money to an irish subsidiary), while claiming it on behalf of their shareholders. The CGT version of this is unrealised gains.

Re: Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

#343

Post by dalbasal »

TimPC wrote: post #323
dalbasal wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The masses don't have wealth, especially if you exclude personal dwellings. In any case, you need "balance sheets" to have CGT, which in theory we do.

Capital gains taxes are based on difference between buy and sell price of specific assets and require only those two data points. That’s very different from accurately pricing an asset yearly.

Technically, or originally perhaps, capital gains are paid based on gains. There are a lot of clauses and loopholes that allow for tax on gains to be deferred until they are realised.

Re: Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

#344

Post by megaman821 »

edp wrote: post #102
rorykoehler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one pays that much in a progressive tax system. Every time this discussion comes up people spout off these numbers but if you calculate out how much you actually pay it's probably in the 20-30% of total salary range. That's still high but it's just dishonest and makes people look like idiots when they throw around 40% etc. If you are truly paying 40% of your income in tax you are earning millions and are benefitin…

Here in France, as a contractor, if I bill a client 100 000€ annually and decide to get as much as possible in personal income, 30 000€ will go as social taxes (health, retirement ...) and for the remaining 70 000€ you will have to pay around 25% as income tax (if you don't have any children). You will have an income of ~52 000€ for 100 000€ billed during the year. You're not earning millions and yet around 50% of re…

In the US as a contractor making $100,000. You would pay $15,000 in social taxes. Around 25% in income tax depending on which state you lived in and still need to pay for health insurance. So taking home 50% of your pay after taxes and insurance is about what you would expect.

Re: Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

#345

Post by m12k »

dmurray wrote: post #273
cheph wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Ireland not a democracy? Can't they vote to change their own tax laws if they have a problem with them?

Actually, no. The Apple case [0] is still pending some more layers of appeals, but both sides accept that Ireland doesn't have complete carte blanche to set its own tax laws. The EU gets to participate in setting them too. Of course, Irish citizens could vote to withdraw from the EU and set their own tax that way, but that's not likely - they generally accept that the benefits of participating in the EU are worth giv…

I'd love for Ireland to withdraw from the EU - that would make it much, much likelier that the rest of us could get a consensus on anti-profit-shifting tax reform with the biggest tax haven out of the union.

Re: Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

#346

Post by nly »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #108
adolph wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People not knowing their tax burden: feature or bug?

I think paying your state and federal taxes in the United States should be seamless. Your employer should take the taxes out of your paycheck. At the end of the month/year, you should get a statement showing all the taxes you paid. I recently had to update my W4 form at work for tax withholding, and what a pain in the ass to read and decipher. Add to that, and I had to do the same thing for my state taxes. I want to…

Do most Americans have to do their own taxes?

It boggles my mind that this is the case.

Re: Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

#347

Post by makomk »

Frost1x wrote: post #330
pc86 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument comes up a lot but nobody is paying 50% income tax in the US. Even if you make a million dollars a year in W2 income, in California, which has the highest marginal tax rate, you'll pay roughly 40% effective, almost entirely to the federal government. Realistically you're going to make a lot less than that W2, which drives the effective rate down considerably, and as remote work becomes more of an expect…

>Also I think it's pretty disingenuous to assume that MS wants to see computer courses taught in school to drive down the cost of labor. So, what's another good explanation as to why software heavy businesses want more software engineers? It seems to me that it's to increase supply to lower costs. If the claim is that they can't capture enough, they can raise comp even more to capture people who don't work in their b…

Remember that Microsoft also benefit from more other businesses becoming software businesses, and it seems like more people in the workforce knowing at least the basics of computers would help with that.

Re: Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

#348

Post by nly »

fallingknife wrote: post #341
nivenkos wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That punishes working people just for working! How are you meant to afford a house and stuff with taxes like that? We need wealth tax - go after the shareholders and landowners, who don't directly create value and dodge a lot of tax.

You buy $10K of DOGE at $0.0001 in 12-1-2020 and it goes to $0.10 on 12-31. You now have $10MM in wealth, and will, owe $500K to the government. DOGE goes back down to $0.0001 on 1-1. Now you owe $500K of taxes and have $10K of assets. "But you should just sell 5% on 12-31 and you will have enough to pay taxes" you say. Yeah, you and everyone else who needs to pay wealth tax. Know what it looks like when everybody se…

Capital gains taxes are accrued on disposal. Until you sell you owe nothing

Re: Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

#349

Post by [deleted] »

refurb wrote: post #325
new_here wrote: post #182

Take a moment to comprehend those numbers: FY18/19 - under $10bn profit FY19/20 - $314.7bn profit (3/4 of Ireland's GDP) and paid no tax on it. > The subsidiary, which collects licence fees for use of copyrighted Microsoft software around the world, recorded an annual profit of $314.7bn in the year to the end of June 2020, according to accounts filed at the Irish Companies Registration Office. Its profits jumped from…

Something doesn’t make sense. If it’s $437B in profit, then revenue must be higher? And what this is saying is that Ireland’s GDP will double in 2020?

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Irish subsidiary paid zero corporate tax on £220bn profit last year

#350

Post by octopoc »

cheph wrote: post #268
seaourfreed wrote: post #226

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…

> 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%). "the rich" pay income taxes as well: https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2020/ In fact, the top 1% paid 24.3% of all income tax. And the top 5% paid 40.6% of all income tax. So it is most definitely taxing the rich. The top 25%…

> In fact, the top 1% paid 24.3% of all income tax. And the top 5% paid 40.6% of all income tax.

Those numbers aren't normalized btw. Americans in the top 1% net worth account for more than 30% of the total net worth of all Americans [1] [2]. 30% > 24.3% so it is slightly regressive from that standpoint.

But there's a bigger picture and that is, what do these rich people do with their money? Does it help people or not? Arguably Jeff Bezos hurts many people's lives (eliminating mom and pop stores, mistreating employees, etc.) while Elon Musk is probably overall helping people (space exploration, more transportation options).

My point is, all the Americans in the bottom X% have to provide something of value to others to maintain / increase their net worth. Many people (not all) at the top Y% are maintaining / increasing their net worth by pushing many people far below them slightly down.

[1] https://windfalldata.com/blog/what-it-takes-to-be-in-the-top...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/10/08/top-1-of-u...

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