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Amazon, Google and Apple Won't Need To Pay Tax, Despite Goverment Threats
girlmad writes "Despite moves by government to get Google, Amazon and Apple to admit they make sales in the UK and US, and therefore should pay tax on these earnings, this article argues these are empty threats and that any taxes paid will get returned to the tech giants in government grants and subsidies. Tough luck to the small firms out there."
why class warfare is alive and well and why everyone hates the government so fucking much?
And for those of you who think this is partisan-minded, the "other" guys (hah! what a joke) would have done exactly the same.
Oh wait, I forgot rule number whatever. "Whenever a rich and important company or person says they're for a tax that should cover them, SURPRISE it ends up covering everybody except them." (OOhh, I'll call it the Buffett Rule.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Megacorps hiring legions of lawyers, accountants and lobbyists to limit/eliminate their tax liabilities. And politicians sucking up to the money bags whilst feigning outrage for the little guy. I'm shocked....just shocked, I say.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Apple and Google enjoy the general public services just like the rest of us. This includes public roads, utilities, postal services. They exist and thrive in a society that is only possible through the strength of an organized nation-state such as the United States of America or Great Britain. This doesn't include any of the subsidies that I'm sure they manage to get or the fact that as a couple of the largest companies in existence, they have the ability to successfully lobby lawmakers.
While most could agree that tax revenue could probably be better spent these days, the fundamental concept of taxes is not stealing. Taxes are the price of civilization.
I've been following this whole shitfest in the UK quite closely for the past few months, and one amusing thing has consistently struck me - the government are trying to be the goody-goody party in all of this, claiming that the companies involved are being evil and ethically corrupt when it comes to "fair share" taxation, while at the very same time flat out refusing to acknowledge that those companies are not doing anything illegal under the current tax regime.
The government also has ruled out changing the tax law to prevent the current behaviours,because then they lose the trivially easy PR they get from "taking the companies to task" infront of Parliament and the media.
It's time to admit that the current tax law doesn't work once you are above PAYE (that's the government standard taxation for employees - normal people in the UK do not have to do any filings because it's all done by the HMRC for them and tax is taken out of their pay checks each month).
Setting up a company in the UK costs about $40. Doing annual returns for that company costs about $350. By working for that company for no wage, and taking out directors dividends, you save serious amounts of money through not having to pay income tax as the Corporate tax rates are significantly smaller than the income tax rates. This scheme is so heavily and widely used, even MPs in all parties got shamed earlier this year when they were named using it - but it's still completely legal.
No one should be expected to voluntarily pay more tax than they legally are required to, and no one should be shamed for not paying more tax than they are legally required to - if you want someone to pay more tax than they are legally required to, then legally require them to pay more tax! Don't beat around the bush, change the fucking law.
Good for Apple and Google. The government didn't earn the money they want to take. The people at Apple and Google worked hard to earn that money, why should it be stolen from them to pay for giveaways to non-workers?
For example, the government pays for police that will arrest people going to an Apple Store with guns and taking whatever they want.
In the EU sales tax is applied in the source country. Companies like Amazon are often based in countries like Luxembourg because of low sales tax rates. The UK government gets no sales tax from Amazon sales (even though the goods are ordered from a co.uk website and shipped from UK warehouses).
Amazon must employ plenty of stackers and shippers though.
They pay for those directly through property taxes, and indirectly through payroll taxes, proportional to what they use. Corporate income tax is not used for any of that. And they mostly use private shipping companies for their products.
Just because some taxes are reasonable and necessary doesn't mean that any/all of them are.
The people at Apple and Google worked hard to earn that money, why should it be stolen from them to pay for giveaways to non-workers?
I think it should be stolen from them because I'm what these days is called a fanatical pinko (formerly known as an Eisenhower Republican).
Google, Apple and Amazon are not doing anything wrong.
Well, they're not doing anything illegal. And that's the crime, that the government can be bought (and cheaply). I can't speak in much detail for the UK, but in the US the Supreme Court has taken "money is speech" (true only in a limited way and in limited circumstances) to absurd extremes. The logical conclusion is that me handing a politician a briefcase stuffed with unmarked non-sequential $100 bills is protected free speech.
The article doesn't say, but it appears that when it says "tax" it is referring to *income* tax. For some reason, a lot of people forget that corporations, unlike people, pay income tax on NET rather than gross. In other words, the corporation pays all of its expenses, then pays income tax on what is left over. Those expenses include your salary, your benefits, new capital projects, and so on. Meanwhile, the real tax burden of the organization is much higher when you add in all the other taxes they are paying: sales tax, property tax, tariffs, and so on. The story that these corporations aren't paying very much in "taxes" is a gross distortion. They just aren't paying very much in income taxes, which is by design.
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So is he a bare-faced liar, or is the article summary bollocks? Sources please.
Given the choice "X, or the article summary is bollocks", the correct answer is _always_ "the article summary is bollocks". You should know that.
Now the truth is that Apple is indeed not funnelling domestic profits overseas. What they are doing, they are keeping overseas profits overseas.
In the EU sales tax is applied in the source country. Companies like Amazon are often based in countries like Luxembourg because of low sales tax rates. The UK government gets no sales tax from Amazon sales (even though the goods are ordered from a co.uk website and shipped from UK warehouses).
This makes no sense. In fact, it makes so little sense, that I don't believe it. I just did a Google search on European sales tax (VAT) policy, and several sites, including this one, contradict what you claim. If sales are below a threshold they are based on the shipping country, and if over the threshold they are based on the destination country. At no point are they based on where the company is incorporated, as you claimed.
Yep, one of the great things is that even though the US and Western Europe have decided they don't want you being productive in their country, there are still countries out there that are much more free.
It's easy to be "free" when the companies in question aren't actually IN your country. The government-provided services the freeloading companies depend on are paid for by the non-dodging taxpayers of the countries in which the business actually operate.
The people at Apple and Google worked hard to earn that money, why should it be stolen from them to pay for giveaways to non-workers
Because while taxation may be tantamount to theft and it may be inherently evil and it may be desirable to minimise it as much as possible, we haven't yet found a more effective way to fund government services ...
Yes we have, long ago. We did it ourselves; often poorly or with spotty coverage, I agree, but certainly not at the price gov't charges for it. I'm not even speaking of the monetary price here either. Unfortunately, our parents and grandparents got lazy and drank the big gov't Koolaid, and we've been enslaved to it ever since, going in deeper with each succeeding generation.
Perhaps our great grand-kids will fix it.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
You miss the point about citizenship. Its not a privilege, its a burden. As a citizen, the government can require certain things of you. As a non citizen, they cannot.
Have gnu, will travel.
Does anyone who seriously uses the cliche that "taxes are theft" deserve to be treated as anything other than a troll? I'm all for open debate with anyone serious, including those who would all but abandon (in the US) the federal government. However, even anarchists may admit that some taxes are necessary. "Taxes are theft" is just a childish rant and should be treated as such.
Your taxes go to pay for things we ALL need. Like roads, and firemen and teachers.
Roads are paid for (mostly) by fuel taxes. Fireman and teachers are paid out of local property taxes. Those taxes are fair, reasonable, and almost impossible to avoid. Income taxes, on the other hand, are easy to avoid by anyone who puts some effort into it. I am self employed, have a six figure income and, through completely legal means, I pay no income tax. The problem is not that the system needs some tweaks to close "loopholes", but that trying to tax net productive activity (rather than consumption or ownership) has perverse side effects and is fundamentally unfair. No country has ever made income tax work well.
This kind of thinking is precisely what is needed to solve these tax problems. Why does the government tax a percentage of profit? Instead, think of it as payments for a service. You have a factory full of computers? Well we the government are protecting that factory with our military, so you should pay a tax based on the value of that factory. You are hiring workers? Well we the government educated them at our schools, so you should pay a per worker tax. Utilizing our public road system means customers can come to your store and buy things? Maybe we'll have some sort of utility sales tax. Also, imagine if those taxes could only be spent on precisely those programs. How quick would we be to go to war if corporations new their military protection taxes were going up?
Well, you see, buying a new headquarters has no impact on PROFITS because that's what we accountants call buying an ASSET, not an EXPENSE.
If you're going to complain about glossing over facts and getting sums wrong you could at least do some basic research into the subject first ?
That's the attitude that I'm talking about, and it's bankrupting this country.
Except in times of large-scale war or financial panic, the government needs to collect taxes to cover its expenditures. If balancing the budget raises taxes enough to be painful, then people will demand reductions in spending. That's the only way you're going to actually shrink the government.
Instead, people like you demand tax cuts first. Well, cutting taxes is easy; they've done it again and again in the past few decades. Cutting actual government spending is hard, because no matter what you cut, you're taking away someone's entitlement. So what we get is a stalemate that generates endless deficits, with no solution in sight.
Nice example. The way you suggest to make the law "fair" is to make it enormously complicated (list every animal). There is a simple way, that really removes the loophole - "if an animal trainer's animal injures a viewer, the trainer must compensate the injured viewer < insert 3-10 classes of injury that every constitution has defined in other sections, and corresponding penalty.>"
Since you kind of assumed a circus scenario, I didn't cross the limits, but it is in general useless to make laws specific so circuses. One would rather say "if any entertainment performance hurts the viewer ...". A separate law for entertainment makes sense because the intent of the viewer in entertainment setting is completely different from, say, an employment setting.
The politicians (at least the bureaucrats who do the actual drafting of laws) know perfectly well how to make simple and real fair laws, and how to overcomplicate to scratch someone's back. They choose to do the latter not out of incompetence as the naive would assume.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.