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Obama Proposes One-Time Tax On $2 Trillion US Companies Hold Overseas
mrspoonsi writes with news about a new proposed tax on overseas profits to help pay for a $478 billion public works program of highway, bridge and transit upgrades. President Barack Obama's fiscal 2016 budget would impose a one-time 14 percent tax on some $2 trillion of untaxed foreign earnings accumulated by U.S. companies abroad and use that to fund infrastructure projects, a White House official said. The money also would be used to fill a projected shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund. "This transition tax would mean that companies have to pay U.S. tax right now on the $2 trillion they already have overseas, rather than being able to delay paying any U.S. tax indefinitely," the official said. "Unlike a voluntary repatriation holiday, which the president opposes and which would lose revenue, the president's proposed transition tax is a one-time, mandatory tax on previously untaxed foreign earnings, regardless of whether the earnings are repatriated." In the future, the budget proposes that U.S. companies pay a 19 percent tax on all of their foreign earnings as they are earned, while a tax credit would be issued for foreign taxes paid, the official said.
This is clearly aimed at companies abusing the "Double Irish" system. Seems like the rate should be set much higher, so that companies are punished and lose more than they would if they did the right thing and repatriated profits and paid the normal tax rates on them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Which will be to shit all over this idea. Mind you, I agree that so-called "windfall taxes" are a bad idea, but corporation that profit from shipping jobs overseas, hiding assets overseas, etc., are nothing if not "un-American", a label the hypocrites of the far right are very fond a throwing about. So yeah, another populist idea that is going to go nowhere.
Weapon of massive capital destruction by a Constitutional enemy that is already damaging and destroying the US middle class.
People forget that the United States has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, and we impose it on American companies foreign-earned capital if they should bring the money back to the States. If you are responsible to the shareholders to be stewards of their investments, you have to take whatever measures you can to avoid heavier than necessary taxes. Hence people park their money off American shores.
This seems like a cash grab to me, where the better option is to really reform the tax code to be equitable within and outside the United States; then the responsible steward of their investors money would feel more free to have that capital here. 20% of 10 million is a lot more than 35% of zero.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
A number of U.S. based companies have already purchase, merged with, and become subsidiaries of Irish companies. That makes profits made in the U.S. "foreign income", and everything outside the U.S. untouchable, because it will never be "repatriated".
The price of companies incorporated in Ireland is going to skyrocket even higher than it has.
It's well understood what they are doing, because the companies are quite open about it. Back in the 90s Apple invented something called the Double Irish, which is where they register is shell company with no employees or other interesting in Ireland and have all the other Apple corporations around the world pay their profits to it in exchange for using the Apple name. Starbucks, Google, Amazon and others all do the same. Since the local corporations don't make any profit (due to the "crippling" fees they pay to Apple Ireland) they pay next to no tax.
So why doesn't Apple Ireland pay tax on all the money it takes? Irish law states that corporations that are headquartered overseas pay corporation taxes where their headquarters are. So Ireland says they pay in the US, the US says they pay in Ireland... and thus they pay no tax on all that money.
Of course they are quite open about this and list the money held in Ireland as part of their balance sheets. Apple is currently taking low interest loans to pay shareholders based on the vast reserves it has in Ireland, rather than bring some of that money back and pay ~40% tax on it.
The EU is working on a fix where corporations pay tax based on how much business they do in each country. This seems to be the best that the US can come up with, given the political climate.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There is no such thing as a one-time tax.
Because hiding your profits overseas is some sort of essential liberty, right?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Take that back and use it. Why should we pay the bank robbers twice?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
In the future, the budget proposes that U.S. companies pay a 19 percent tax on all of their foreign earnings as they are earned
I wonder what the legal basis of this would be. Multinational companies that are interested in minimizing their taxes (and let's face it - who isn't?) already are incorporated elsewhere, and their earnings on U.S. operations are already taxed in the US. So, exactly what "U.S. companies" have substantial "foreign earnings"?
For example, if a corporation is incorporated in Switzerland, pays taxes it earns on Swiss operations to Switzerland, pays taxes on its U.S. operations to the U.S., and pays taxes as required by Swiss law on earnings made elsewhere, what else is there for the U.S. to tax?
....they never took Obama's budget proposals seriously. I'm not sure why the rest of us should even bother paying attention.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
How does this not drive more Burger Kings into Canada? If they go after McDonalds and not (now Canadian) Burger King, they drive corps out. If they go after BK, then can any country do that, tax USA based corporate assets? It's probably better than a VAT, I guess (which is why USA corporate taxes are relatively high, it makes up for lack of Value Added Tax).
Gently reply
The biggest 'hole' in the federal budget is $200 billion dollars a year in unfunded Medicare costs, most of which is because of Medicare Advantage and Part D, both of which were passed with a partisan GOP vote without any funding save for new debt. Overall that largess has had America's future generation pump more than 2 trillions into today's GOP voting seniors. Sure paying off two trillion in debt isn't a bad idea, but that does nothing to plug the GOP debt hole in the first place. The best idea would be to plug it in a separate bill. Using this 'one time' money for over due transportation programs is bound to generation at least 10 times the cost in economic activity.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Is registration enough? Are there advantages to being a US company? What does Apple, which I assume is a US company lose if it suddenly became a "UK company?" Anyone know?
Actually essential liberty is not having your property and earnings stolen from you by any government. In this case, however, the government in question is trying to steal money it doesn't even have physical access to and the money that were not earned in the USA. It's trying to steal money that was earned from foreign operations from foreign customers. Back to the international form of socialism for Obama, I take it? Well, foreign earnings will not come back to USA at all ever of-course and all the companies have to do now is start moving their headquarters from the USA. Production lines are already moved, they just have to take the next logical step.
You can't handle the truth.
... and he has zero pull there... so... he can write executive orders and talk to foreign leaders and engage in 'police action' wars... but... he cannot pass tax policy.
If he ACTUALLY... seriously... wants to pas a tax bill... then he has to talk to congress first. And... he hasn't done that in awhile.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Exactly. If this plan also included banning the limitless deficit spending, as well as substantial simplification of the tax code, I'd support this. Close the loopholes for the 1%, reduce government expenditures and force it to levy specific taxes that fund specific needed public programs. Reduce the bloat of those programs and junk the rest. Reduce or eliminate all other tax besides income. Leftover cash goes back to the taxpayer as refunds. No more slush funds. No more state sponsored monopolies. The state should not be aiding multinationals' ability to corner markets.
Otherwise, you're right, 2 trillion will just disappear across the event horizon of the growing deficit singularity with no effect.
I thought it was the corporations stealing by leeching off society and then not paying the membership fees. If they don't want to pay any tax they are free to leave society and stop stealing our free education and training, healthcare, roads, police and judicial services etc.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's well understood what they are doing, because the companies are quite open about it. Back in the 90s Apple invented something called the Double Irish, which is where they register is shell company with no employees or other interesting in Ireland and have all the other Apple corporations around the world pay their profits to it in exchange for using the Apple name. Starbucks, Google, Amazon and others all do the same. Since the local corporations don't make any profit (due to the "crippling" fees they pay to Apple Ireland) they pay next to no tax.
Except that's not what Apple is doing. See the fact that Apple US paid 6 billion dollars in US taxes on 18 billion profit.
What Apple Europe (which is in Ireland) does is holds all the profits that Apple makes in countries other than the US, because they can't bring that money back into the US. The US wants to charge a second round of taxes, even though European taxes have already applied.
This is the same thing that the US does to dual nationals - a US/UK dual citizen working in the UK will pay income tax both to the UK and to the US, because the US thinks they're entitled to taxes on money made abroad.
The reality here is that what should change is the US's policy of taxing all money everywhere, whether or not it ever had anything to do with the US.
"to avoid paying their fair share"
That phrase "fair share" is dishonest. It is vague and subjective, while pretending to be objectively normative.
That is exactly right.
Social Security and Medicare costs are only going to get worse as our population ages. And those costs are what is really tanking the federal budget. Not welfare queens or other conservative mythical leaches on society.
And over the past 20 years, our wages have declined and our standard of living has declined also - but worker productivity has gone through the roof.
Big business and the billionaire class has taken the difference and none of that has ended up in the workers hands. We are working longer and harder and our lives are getting worse.
That $2 trillion represents part of that difference.
Well, foreign earnings will not come back to USA at all ever of-course and all the companies have to do now is start moving their headquarters from the USA.
Yes, that's exactly what will happen.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
maybe its good maybe its bad, but when bureaucracy is involved there is no such thing as one time.
lose != loose
I take it Apple 'leeched of the society' by creating production lines and products that provide them with all their earnings around the world? :)
Yeah, they have the money because they made it, they made it by creating products people are buying and by creating enormous production lines while at it. Only individuals / companies create the economy and governments are the ones that leech off of that productivity, not the other way around.
Of-course companies that are under government protection leech off of that productivity as well (like certain bailed out banks, military industrial complex and such).
Any company that creates a product that is then voluntarily traded for by the people in the market is an economic engine and a productive member of society before even a single cent is stolen from it by a government and socialists that want and vote for that money to be stolen.
The actual leeches are government employees and the mob that provides those employees with the power to steal.
You can't handle the truth.
Does Obama huddle up with a flashlight and a copy of Atlas Shrugged under the covers every night thinking that it's some kind of instruction manual? Every time I start to warm up to the guy a little, he pulls this kind of nonsense to remind me why I voted against him.
1.The Republican Congress will never approve this idea. Never. 2. Europe closing tax havens? Africa is ripe to be next with new tax havens and super cheap manufacturing centers.
Yes, but one of the examples there is Burger King and most people don't understand something about that company, it was not American even before it moved the headquarters to Canada, it was mostly Brazilian. That company has a complicated history but Americans think for some reason that the company, whose majority owner is a Brazilian conglomerate is an American business... they are uninformed.
You can't handle the truth.
So, you want them to stop "leaching [education, etc.] off society" by.. discontinuing hiring people here?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
talking at congress in a televised media event is not the same thing as talking with anyone.
as to the budget... both houses need to pass it or it doesn't happen. And congress has not been passing budgets for some time. They've been passing little extension budgets that are short term and the president is not going to veto one of those because they didn't include his pet line item.
So... no and wrong.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Nobody's talking about "taxing other countries".
US law says that, if you're a US citizen, you're liable for US taxes. Doesn't matter where you live or where your money comes from. However, it also recognises that it's not nice to subject citizens residing overseas to double taxation--so if you live in $country and pay $country's taxes on your income there, the US will often accept this as having fulfilled your obligation. But if you've income that you're not paying taxes on, anywhere, and the IRS finds out, they will come calling.
What Obama is apparently intending is to extend this philosophy to US corporations, which currently enjoy a much better deal than you or I. They pay US taxes on profits reported in the US. They don't pay US taxes on profits reported in other countries--and here comes the important part--even if they report those profits in $nation, which happens to have negligible or even zero corporate taxes. Whereas, if I move to $nation and they don't make me pay income tax there, then I get to pay it to the US.
So corporations currently get a huge overseas tax dodge that you and I don't. Quoth TFS,
In the future, the budget proposes that U.S. companies pay a 19 percent tax on all of their foreign earnings as they are earned, while a tax credit would be issued for foreign taxes paid, the official said.
So in other words, US corporations making money overseas would be subject to taxes on it in a manner very much like how US citizens are already subject to their overseas earnings, and with same proviso that they won't be doubly taxed.
Okay, go ahead and explain how this is "retarded" or unfair. Seems pretty smart and fair to me.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Aw, crap, that should have been "very much like how US citizens are already subject to US taxes on their overseas earnings".
(And I even used Preview, dammit.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You can hire who you want, but first you pay the fee for their education. Or educate them yourself, up to you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why wouldn't getting more money be a good idea regardless?
Except that's not what Apple is doing. See the fact that Apple US paid 6 billion dollars in US taxes on 18 billion profit.
That is what they told you. The US Senate grabbed Apple's IRS paperwork and found a check for $2.5 billion.
What Apple Europe (which is in Ireland) does is holds all the profits that Apple makes in countries other than the US, because they can't bring that money back into the US. The US wants to charge a second round of taxes, even though European taxes have already applied.
European taxes have not been collected because of the tricks Apple uses. The EU is pursing Apple for dodged taxes as well. One of Apple's subsidiaries paid absolutely no taxes at all for 5 years despite $30 billion in profits. $0 taxes, $30 billion profit.
This is the same thing that the US does to dual nationals - a US/UK dual citizen working in the UK will pay income tax both to the UK and to the US, because the US thinks they're entitled to taxes on money made abroad.
Does said US citizen get to hold his US passport? Does he get to use US Embassies? Will he be rescued by the US military if kidnapped in Iraq? All that costs money. And the guy gets to deduct from his US tax bill anything paid in the UK anyways.
The reality here is that what should change is the US's policy of taxing all money everywhere, whether or not it ever had anything to do with the US.
As long as it has nothing to do with the US.. I agree the US shouldn't tax it. Last time I drove through Cupertino though, I'm pretty sure I saw a giant Apple logo behind a bunch of people carrying Apple Ids. At least one of Apple's Irish subsidiaries has zero employees though.
Because hiding your profits overseas is some sort of essential liberty, right?
The profits were earned overseas, mostly from products and services created by non-Americans and sold to non-Americans. There is no rationale reason for America to be taxing these profits. No other country has this kind of extraterritorial tax. Most economists agree that it is counter-productive, and just encourages companies to base their headquarters somewhere other than America. Business taxes should be based on where the economic activity occurs, not where the business is registered.
Anyway, this proposal has ZERO chance of passing a Republican Congress. This is about electoral politics, not tax policy. The loser here is Hillary Clinton. To win in the general election, she has to position herself as a moderate centrist, that can win in the Midwest, and maybe even pick off a Southern state. But by steering the Democratic party into hare-brained anti-business claptrap, Obama is diminishing her ability to do that.
Pull your head out of your rear end.
You are talking about the people that threw George H.W. Bush out of office because he violated his word on "No New Taxes"
You are talking about the people that force their candidates to sign pledges not to raise taxes.
Man I wish I had it that good...
Mark my words, as we get closer to the election, he'll start breaking out the big guns. I'm sure he's already planning to talk about reproductive rights and race relations at some point along the way. I'm surprised he played immigration as early as he did but I'm sure it's going to come up again. I have to admit he surprised me on Cuba. Definitely didn't see THAT one coming.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
As long as you don't expect said government to back your claim to said property or earnings, fair enough. And are willing to build and maintain your private financial system, of course - anti-counterfeiting efforts aren't free, after all. As well as your own road system, your own communication system, your own military defence...
No, having all your living expenses paid for by others so you can have more disposable income is not an essential liberty. Pay your taxes and pull your weight.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Government 'education' is about as useful as government 'phone'. The next bubble to burst will be the government bubble, the bonds, the fiat currency and the entire idea of centralised governments that will be proven to be outdated and bad for society as a concept altogether. Hell, it is already proven to be a horrid, inhumane, oppressive, economically destructive, cancerous hazard to the individual well being around the world, it's just the masses haven't really understood this yet, so they will have to accept it on an instinctual level rather than on an intellectual one (they are incapable of understanding it intellectually, after all 'government provided education' oxymoron hits hard there).
You can't handle the truth.
Any additional taxes will just be added to the sales price, so there's no point in having them.
Sure there's a point. It becomes a hidden tax rather than a visible one, and voters don't get as pissy about those even when they disproportionately affect the poor.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Embassies? Military protection? Original education, roads, and infrastructure that got you overseas, rather than keeping you in a hovel in a ghetto? If you don't want to support the country, give up your citizenship. Then you don't need to worry about the US or its taxes or laws unless you come back.
That is all.
Actually counterfeiting is what governments around the world are actively involved in, that's all the 'QE' crap, paper money printing is all about.
Roads, education, health care, communications, etc., none of it should have anything to do with government in the first place, unless of-course you want to have a monopoly on such things and have it protected with government military (which is why government military is also a horrid outdated idea).
The only way to 'pull your weight' in a society is to be a productive member of it and to work in the private sector. Government is the economic leech that destroys the productivity and wealth, it doesn't add anything to it. All real productivity is done privately, all that governments do is theft (and in many cases murder), nothing else.
Taxes shouldn't exist and they are not paying for civilization, they are paying for destruction, monopoly power, murder. All legitimate economic activity is mandatory, nobody should ever be forced to do anything as a group by thugs with guns.
You can't handle the truth.
If they don't want to pay any tax they are free to leave society
Wrong. They are not free to leave. The Obama administration prevented AbbVie from leaving, and is fighting efforts by other companies to leave.
stop stealing our free education and training
So if an Italian buys a car from a factory in Britain, he is "stealing education" if he doesn't pay tax to America?
Because the tax on citizens is already retarded and no other country is that retarded. The fix is to get rid of that retardation, not spread it to corporations.
I can see that as an intended consequence - Obama makes history as the first black President, then gets overshadowed by first woman President. Does it make sense for him to enhance his place in history by making sure the first woman doesn't come along for another dozen years or so?
Or am I just off my meds today, and seeing conspiracies everywhere? And what are you looking at me for?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Because the tax on citizens is already retarded and no other country is that retarded. The fix is to get rid of that retardation, not spread it to corporations.
*That* is an argument that is very possibly worth making.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Stolen, huh? So I assume you would rather the government dissolve, leaving no infrastructure, no property rights, and no justice system? You'll have to staff your own protection, since you don't want police or military defense. I guess the biggest guy wins... hope you like that new dictator.
But then I suppose you wouldn't care for that so much. You might at least want to form an alliance with your family and neighbors. Perhaps you'll agree not to steal from each other, and have the toughest men keep watch over the town and keep the dictator's army out. But they need to eat and can't keep watch all day while also worrying about growing their own crop, so the town decides that everyone should give part of their goods in exchange for the protection.
Then your town and others nearby might decide, we are reasonable folk and aren't each other's enemies. So you form an alliance and pool your resources to focus protection on the outer borders. Oh and since one town has a great market for clothing, and another has a nice oil well, and yet another has fertile land, now you need roads to travel between the towns. You pool your resources to help built those roads.
This is a system of government, funded by taxes. It is the inevitable outcome of humanity, and will continue to grow bigger so long as the people are mostly satisfied with that government.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Yes, what about the rest of the federal government's spending, of which military spending is not even a third. Social entitlement spending is what the vast bulk of your federal taxes and borrowing go towards, not aircraft carriers.
Indeed, companies collect taxes from consumers, they don't pay taxes.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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Inventors, both native and foreign born, live in the U.S., after being educated in U.S. universities, using U.S. infrastructure and support networks. They land jobs with U.S. companies to invent, develop and sell products to U.S. citizens. The U.S. patent rights on those products are sold to a foreign company which then charges the U.S. corporation a high royalty. The patents are only valuable because of the extensive U.S. patent system which protects the intellectual property of inventors and their corporate assignees, foreign or domestic. The foreign shell company makes all of the profits in a small country with tiny or non-existent taxes. The U.S. company claims all the royalty payments as expenses, wiping out U.S. profits. Here is one example of many. http://www.usatoday.com/story/... Then, tax attorneys educated by U.S. law schools prepare U.S. corporate tax returns that legalize all of this under laws written by corporate lobbyists for the benefit of U.S. corporations. Then the U.S. corporations control their media subsidiaries (ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS), to try to justify all of this. It isn't a perfect plutocracy, so they must pay P.R. firms, pundits, and think tanks to convince people like you that Barack Obama is a socialist trying to steal their money, and that his 14% tax proposal to pay for U.S. highways is wildly unfair double taxation.
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But by all means. Go ahead and keep watching Fox "News". It is your right. Rupert Murdock's interests are undoubtedly aligned with the long term interests of U.S. citizens. I'm sure the republic will limp along just fine if all its citizenry are too busy to discover anything resembling the truth. And don't worry your little head. Obama's proposal has zero chance of being passed by either the corporate-controlled House or Senate. Even if I changed your mind (which I am certain I have not), there are millions upon millions out there who will listen to corporate sponsored political commercials and vote to keep either the corporate-backed republicans or corporate-backed democrats in power. I can't convince them all. They won't see this post, or visit my website. It is simply TLDR. You have won the argument. Congratulations.
Join the IParty!
Someone forgot about Ex Post Facto being an amendment. This is close enough to qualify in any court. Instead of retro-taxing them, how about passing a law that says from now on profits that they're pretending are made overseas are taxable in the US.
Embassies charge us to use their services. Why am I paying twice? Even renunciation costs 2 thousand bucks. The U.S. military protects america's borders (when it's not off playing in the sand, anyway), so what benefit do I get there?
I also have a higher cost of living here than you do in the states. Yet somehow, the U.S. government sees it as just to decrease my expendable income in comparison to my coworkers, putting me at a disadvantage and actively discouraging me from moving abroad.
As soon as I can renounce, I will; it could well be that the next proposal that comes by is to tax all expatriates an extra 2 trillion. But I can't do that until I've spent long enough abroad to get another passport.
Personally, I think this citizenship-based taxation was a mistake; whoever created the law probably didn't think through the implications it would have on non-resident Americans (no other country aside from Somalia does this!). Since discovering they had the ability, though, the government has been keen to steal income from expatriates, knowing there is little we can do about it.
That phrase "fair share" is dishonest. It is vague and subjective,
A tax code which permits corporations to hide profits while taxing citizens normally is dishonest.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is a rare occasion for me... I actually agree with the President on this. This will force US corporations to re-invest in jobs and infrastructure.
Yes, this is DOA to a Republican Congress. As for rhetorical [d]effectiveness, please consider the irony of the Feds trying to impose a property tax or alternatively an ex-post facto law (retroactively taxing past earnings.)
If a former professor of Constitutional Law could shred it without so much as a passing mention, what does that say about the man's character?
Liberty means no ex post facto laws. Earnings made before passage of any such law (which, let's face it, will NEVER pass with the current Congress - whether you agree with them or not) should be excluded from this. If the Government can retroactively tax your profits, then why can't they retroactively tax the earnings in your 401K? Change your Roth IRA to be taxed when you pull out funds when you retire? Decide to take any money you've saved in the past and tax it at a high rate in the future? Is that liberty?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
..world. This way US companies won't have to shelter their assets overseas.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Yes, the BEST way to get things is to have someone else pay for them. Force companies to pay additional taxes to give people free stuff - that's a great solution, and will really increase the perceived value of that free stuff!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I can understand trying to get companies to stop gaming the system by shuffling their US profits to overseas holding companies to avoid taxes, but is this what this proposal is actually doing? If it is I'm all for it, but somehow I wonder if this is trying to tax overseas profits from overseas sales simply because the company is US owned. There was a raft of articles a few years back about US citizens having to renounce their citizenship because they were being taxed at obscene rates despite the fact that they didn't live, work, vote or even visit the US. Maybe its my latent paranoia but I wonder if this is the corporate version of this.
How about simplifying the tax law for everyone, instead of creating more interesting bonus work for Apple's and Google's accountants, lobbyists and lawyers?
The smaller companies will end up paying the price for this one once again, too.
I don't watch Fox news or any TV for that matter, I don't like to waste time and I have no time to waste, I run a business and I hire people in more than one country to do it as well.
My take on centralised governments is right here, so is my take on income taxes.
Governments are an impediment to progress, they are actively destroy economies and oppressing individuals (stealing from them and murdering them), only individuals build productive economies, governments are leeches, feeding on the blood of the productive members of society.
You can't handle the truth.
Because hiding your profits overseas is some sort of essential liberty, right?
The profits were earned overseas, mostly from products and services created by non-Americans and sold to non-Americans. There is no rationale reason for America to be taxing these profits.
No, there's plenty of rationale for such a tax. There are one trillion such reasons - our annual cash deficit. The President simply wants more money to spread around, to buy more votes and influence for those he cares about (and to punish those who oppose him). It's a highly immoral and illogical rationale - but it's a rationale, nevertheless.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
What exactly is their "fair share"?
That term doesn't actually say anything, other than perhaps warm fuzzy feelings...
So if Apple builds iPads in China and sells them in Australia, you think the U.S. Government should get a cut?
If so, why would Apple want to remain a U.S. based company again?
Unemployment is dropping, the problem is underemployment. There's no wage growth because corporations are hoarding wealth rather than rewarding good employees with decent raises. Like the 1% they take and take and can never have enough. The only solution is to tax them all at high levels to fund a basic minimum income, universal healthcare, and free 4 year college for all high school graduates with 3.0 GPA. So that way people who actually do the work can cope with stagnant wages. Of course, that would take a strong willed president, like an LBJ or FDR to shove that through. Unfortunately Mr. Obama turned out to be the second coming of Carter instead of FDR.
"In 2014, job growth averaged 246,000 per month, compared with an average monthly gain of 194,000 in 2013."
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
This is somewhat more than the ~150,000/mo which is needed to account for the increase in the number of employable Americans.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/j/jobsgrowth.asp
In other words, there is definitely job growth. As for wage growth, there isn't any. but this appears to be a long-term trend:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
Nobody's talking about "taxing other countries".
US law says that, if you're a US citizen, you're liable for US taxes. Doesn't matter where you live or where your money comes from. However, it also recognises that it's not nice to subject citizens residing overseas to double taxation--so if you live in $country and pay $country's taxes on your income there, the US will often accept this as having fulfilled your obligation.
Only up to a fairly moderate level. After that, even if you pay taxes on that additional income in your resident country - you also get to pay US taxes on the same funds. That's why most companies will pay a "tax bonus" to its overseas US employees to compensate for the extra tax they will have to pay. And of course, there is the FBAR forms, and lots of other additional paperwork required since you are overseas - and the US Government wants to ensure it gets every penny (and then some) from wherever it can... Even if you live outside the US for the entire year (essentially using zero of the US Federal resources).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If the cost of renunciation is too big for you to contemplate it, then by definition having a US citizenship is worth more than the rather low cost of renunciation. If $2000 is all that is keeping you from renouncing the citizenship, then you are obviously not that much worse off for having to pay taxes on your earnings abroad.
The USA is one country that does go out of its way to protect its citizens abroad, probably to the point of pissing off a lot of other countries, and that costs money. If you would rather not have that, then renounce.
Besides, I am sure there are arrangements to ensure that you don't pay more tax than you would if you were living and working in America e.g. due to the use of tax credits.
Embassies? Military protection? Original education, roads, and infrastructure that got you overseas, rather than keeping you in a hovel in a ghetto? If you don't want to support the country, give up your citizenship. Then you don't need to worry about the US or its taxes or laws unless you come back.
Give up your citizenship, and you get to pay a tax on all assets immediately payable at that time. Even if those assets were 100% earned AND held overseas. Even if they were "received" via marriage. Marry a wealthy foreign citizen and decide to change citizenship? You get to pay an expatriation tax on their holdings they had before your marriage when you give up your citizenship...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
None of his liberal proposals have become law to date. Now he's just trying to pretend to be a liberal so we won't pin the conservative laws that he has signed on his presidential legacy.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Where you earned? Yes.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Infrastructure is not a government concern
Infrastructure is a property rights concern. Property rights is a government concern.
Justice system and property rights do not require centralised governments, each locality can deal with it however it wants
So property rights is a government concern, just not a centralized government concern? I can see that logic. But then how do we deal with a citizen of town A owning land and things in town B? And how does the justice system handle the case of someone in town C coming to town B to steal things from the citizen from town A?
We could set up treaties between the towns, and have a documentation system to provide proof of citizenship and other details that matter. As for me, I like being able to drive to the next town to shop or eat or whatever I do, without needing to go through border checks.
thus if you want to use a road or have protection against attacks by bandits, that's your responsibility to hire your protection and to pay your road tolls
Golly, that's just what I want! To pay a body guard to ride with me in my Hummer with machine guns. And to have to stop to pay at every - single - entrance into every road, and from every road.
Actually no, that's not at all what I want. I want my 10-mile commute to take 15 or 20 minutes, not 3 hours waiting in lines at toll booths. I want to pay a reasonable amount of money for my drive, without having to pay by-the-hour for some guy to protect me as I drive down the road.
I don't like everything about our society. I don't care for many things our government does. I would change a lot of things if I had my way. But at the end of the day, I feel that all of that is relatively minor compared to truly horrible dictatorships where the people have no rights, no freedoms, poor health and are daily in fear for their lives and for the lives of those they care about. We should fight to make sure our society doesn't degenerate in that direction, but its useless to throw it all away just because it's not perfect.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
No, there's plenty of rationale for such a tax. There are one trillion such reasons - our annual cash deficit
Arbitrary and confiscatory taxation will indeed raise money in the short term. In the long run, it will push businesses, investment, and jobs, out of America. America is a business friendly country, and we have prospered because of that. But many other countries are working hard to be more business friendly, while America is moving in the opposite direction. We are in the process of killing the goose that lays golden eggs.
America as a whole, should learn from what happened in California. It used to be one of the most business friendly states. But California pushed more and more taxes and regulation on to business, and ramped up social spending. Today it is considered one of the least business friendly. Most semiconductor manufacturing is gone, many moves are made elsewhere, businesses are leaving, and unemployment is stuck several percentage points above the national average.
Make the corporate tax rate ZERO. Nothing. Make it apply to corporations exclusively headquartered in the US, with at least 51% board members being US residents, and at least 51% of upper management (defined as vice presidents and above) being US residents. You'll see every major company in the world immediately relocate to the US - and most of their higher end employees either relocating or hiring new ones here. Massive gain in income tax (given that these folks tend to be in the top 1% of income earners, and they tend to pay nearly a 24% income tax rate).
My back-of-the-envelope calculations say we'd easily replace the $450 billion or so that we get in corporate income tax - especially since the top 1% already pay about $370 billion in income taxes alone. Double that number of people (which is about what would happen if you brought over most of the top 1000 companies worldwide), and you'll more than double the taxes paid by the top 1% - income tax, excise taxes, taxes on their employees, etc.
Encourage companies to move here and grow our economy, rather than penalizing success overseas. Become the ultimate tax haven, the best place to do business - and watch the economy roar.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Does he get to use US Embassies?
How does one use an embassy?
As an expat, there are a very small number of reasons (I forget, maybe 4 or 5) that I will even be allowed into the embassy. Basically, my US passport will get me a ticket out of the country if WWIII starts, but other than that, the fact that the embassy exists is of absolutely no day-to-day use to me.
You haven't thought things through well enough. You imagine that you can pay for "protection from highway bandits" and that this is somehow different from government. Wake up. That is what government is. Protection from highway bandits. If you somehow managed to convince everyone to eliminate the U.S. government, then the question of roads would immediately pop up. Without roads you can't get to work or deliver products to markets. You can't have markets, because thieves and bandits would raid them. So, you would pay for your own private guards. Pretty soon, you would find that there are businesses providing protection. You would hire them, and so would other companies. But they would fight each other. Somehow, the fighting would ultimately get resolved. Either some warlord would emerge from the fighting as victorious leader who would impose order, or people would get together and vote on rules so that private protection companies would not fight. Rules, and a rulemaking process would evolve from your garden of eden of liberty. You can't avoid it. There are other people living on the planet. You have to get along with them. It isn't easy. You can't just say, "hey, this is my stuff, everyone keep their hands off of it" and expect everything to be fine. Again, wake up. Where did you get the stuff? Were you born with it? Did God pre-ordain that you own it? You don't think far enough ahead, and think about what will happen if you get rid of government. It will evolve again. And again. Everywhere. You can either react to it like it is some alien creature, or you can plan ahead, and try to optimize the rules that eventually evolve. Because rules will evolve, by force. It can either be a democratic force, or a dictatorial force. Or some mixture. But try not to be so simplistic in your thinking. It is frustrating to read.
Join the IParty!
Roman, go spend some quality time in the library (at taxpayer's expense, mind you) and read up on some history. Look at how well neo-anarchists have provided for the 'general good'. Look up some actual, functioning examples of libertarian philosophy.
And if you find any, come back here and tell us about it.
Yes, capitalism is pretty screwy. Doesn't work well. Not a stable system, needs lots of inputs to keep from feeding back on itself and destroying everything in sight. No, this 'civilization' will not last forever and has a number of major issues with it at the moment.
But your goofy system won't work beyond a 12 pack of brownies.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Possibly.
Ditto
BLOCKQUOTE>Will he be rescued by the US military if kidnapped in Iraq?
Extremely unlikely.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Paying for a service, choosing to pay for a service and choosing what service to pay for is entirely different from being coerced and oppressed by the mob to pay for nonsense that I have 0 interest in, actually less than 0 interest. It's even much much much worse than that, every dollar and cent that is stolen by government from the productive society and diverted to various government initiatives destroys the economy, the market, the society, every dollar that government gets has an untold multiplier attached to it. That's the dollar that goes towards increasing government power, that's the dollar that is taken out of the productive economy, out of savings, out of investments and is worse than wasted: it's wasted and it is used to create more government oppressive structures that end up stealing more from the individuals in the productive economy.
No, paying for a service of your choice and being forced to give up your own life and fruits of your labour to the thugs with guns with the authority provided to them by the mob cannot be compared even slightly to voluntary market exchange.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, but one of the examples there is Burger King and most people don't understand something about that company, it was not American even before it moved the headquarters to Canada, it was mostly Brazilian. That company has a complicated history but Americans think for some reason that the company, whose majority owner is a Brazilian conglomerate is an American business... they are uninformed.
roman_mir is wrong all over the place today. You mean this Burger King? [from wikipedia]
Trading name
Burger King
Type
Public
Traded as NYSE: BKW
Industry Restaurants
Genre Fast food restaurant
Predecessor Insta-Burger King
Founded
Insta-Burger King: July 28, 1953 in Jacksonville, Florida
Current company: 1954 in Miami, Florida
-----
So it clearly WAS an American company. It doesn't matter who owns the shares, then or now. The company WAS American. So now we have the past established. Let's move on to the present.
Does it exist in the USA? Yes. Does it have a corporate and or physical presence in the USA? Yes and yes. Do any American people or business/trusts own shares? Yes on all counts. So clearly it IS still an American business.
Now let's move on to the last corner of your thesis, how would most Americans answer the question: What is the nationality of the majority shareholder of the company incorporated as "Burger King"?
I'd guess "I don't know." is the most common answer. We can go to wikipedia and see that 3G capitol, a brazilian founded investment group is the current owner, as of 5 years ago when they took it private.
So really, your misleading statement is more accurately stated: "Most people don't BK wa bought by Brazil in 2010."
No shit, most people don't know Pepsi soda and Frito chips are the same company, either. This just in frm the "Water is Wet" news desk: "People are ignorant about things they don't have direct experience with..."
The thing is: The money this tax is aimed at is not in the US and - by international law - was not earned in the US. To impose such a tax, the US must do some combination of violating signed treaties and forcing foreign jurisdictions to subject themselves to US domestic law. The US might have been able to pull something like that off, say, during the Cold War. Now? After the 2008 banking crisis? After the total muck the US has made of the Middle East? After Snowdon and the NSA revelations? Forget it, the US has lost too much credibility for such a naked power/cash grab to ever work.
Option a: The current US administration really is this clueless. Sadly, a real possibility, given the other idiocies they have shown.
Option b: This is a distraction. Just like a magician - attracts your attention with one hand, while, the other hand...someone is getting his pocket picked.
The US is bloody bankrupt, with current debt approaching $20 trillion and unfunded liabilities of around ten times that amount. It's all about cash, to keep paying for the bread and circuses, so that the political elite can put off the inevitable reckoning just a little bit longer.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Why do we have to give corporations anything? The US is the one with a friggin army. Go in an sieze the friggin funds and tell them tough fuckin cookies. And at the same time cut back their HB-1 visas and start negotiations. They can either start moving jobs back and hiring LOCAL developers and LOWER C-level wages, or we are going to continue to play hard ball.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
It is unfair because the profits of a corporation get taxed anyway during outflow, through the taxes on dividends and capital gains. Corporate income tax thus brings double taxation on that money. Those countries which have little or no corporate income tax are taking this into consideration and are being fair, unlike this money grab by Obama.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Anarchists are mostly irrational leftists, who want to destroy what they don't understand (property rights for example).
Clearly I am not with any socialist ideas, not on any level, not even slightly. Free market capitalism is not anarchism and anarcho-capitalism is not anarchism either. Maybe you want to read some of those books, I have had my share by now.
Capitalism is only private ownership and operation of property, there is nothing that makes it 'not work well', what screws things up is government oppression, be it dictatorial oppression or mobocracy. Free market capitalism has provided the biggest economic success in the history of the humanity in the 19th century USA and in the late 20th, early 21st century China, in Singapore, in Switzerland, in Hong Kong. It's ironic to see former communist dictatorship in China embrace so many capitalist ideas and reduce government power to provide a much freer market system, but it is working as it is supposed to, increasing the wealth within the society by removing so many government imposed constraints that the society used to face.
Growing government power is what is destroying USA and European economies, not abundance of individual freedom.
You can't handle the truth.
http://www.boxer.senate.gov/pr...
This is somewhat related to the anti-vaccination idiocy that is going on. This is the epitome of rich, fat, clueless idiots who are all for benefits of society but are too stupid to realize where the benefits come from.
All they can think of is how they can be more "free" without realizing that with freedom comes responsibility. Otherwise it degenerates to animal-like behavior.
I suppose you can consider living a caveman like existence, with a stockpile of guns and food, on 24 hour watch to protect yourself from others who want to take away either/both, is some sort of freedom but I am almost positive these idiots aren't thinking of this type of freedom.
Wow Roma-mir what a stupid argument. Go ahead now and signup for the one way trip to mars. You obviously have no place in our society. Don't worry from our perspective, societies, we can accommodate your anti-social ilk. In fact we have made great strides in creating a society that even has space for anti-social assholes like yourself. I am all into self-organization, people freely and autonomously working together to solve problems. But there is no relationship between autonomous self-organization and anything "private". To argue that individuals take care of all their needs privately, ie. With sole and exclusive claim, is borderline fascist. Have a great day.
Usually, people making such accusations are the ones who like to move goal posts. Today's regulation, tax, and borrowing is never enough for tomorrow, right? The government is too big to fail, too? It's bad enough that the banks were treated this way (if that wasn't a prime example of the 1% treading on the rest of us, what is?).
I've never advocated for anarchy. All I said was that the state should have to work within budgets just like the rest of us, whether we're the top 1% or the bottom 99. I don't mind hitting up the top 10% or so to help pay off the debt, esp the large organizations that've benefited from taxpayer loans over the years, but the system that allowed the abuse to happen still needs to be fixed first. The democrat and republican parties are too mired in their ideological purity and/or political alliances to do this.
Once an assets is declared to a government entities to be at a certain place under a certain laws, it should be valid for all government entities, and any change to that to a different government entities declared as fraud. If you declare in the US that your tax is in ireland, then in ireland declare it in the US, then that alone should be enough to declare you a tax frauder in the US. Or in ireland.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
A tax is not stealing. Period. You might be in favor or against it but the present deal is that you do not pay upfront for every consumable, e.g. roads, defense education of your workforce: instead you pay through taxes.
You lack the sophistication to explain why you disagree with taxes and falsely equate a levy with stealing to cover up for this.
Your malicious argument is like raping the readers (see what i did there?). Go back to the drawing board and come back when you can explain why a government that is running a deficit is according to GOP-types overtaxing rather than undertaxing.
He's proposed lots of shit. It won't get through congress, so... Hey, I'm glad he's framing the debate. I'm glad he's putting this out there. I'm glad he's forcing people to say "No, I'm against lots of common sense stuff that all the people want to do."
I'm a little bitter though. Where has this shit been the last couple of years? The cynic in me thinks there's an election coming soon... Hey, I could be wrong. Maybe he actually just now realized the Rs aren't going to work with him and he's wasted the last couple of years trying to "reach across the isle".
Because hiding your profits overseas is some sort of essential liberty, right?
The profits were earned overseas, mostly from products and services created by non-Americans and sold to non-Americans. There is no rationale reason for America to be taxing these profits. No other country has this kind of extraterritorial tax. Most economists agree that it is counter-productive, and just encourages companies to base their headquarters somewhere other than America. Business taxes should be based on where the economic activity occurs, not where the business is registered.
First of all, the profits were NOT made overseas as you claim. They were BOOKED overseas by "Me" billing "I" millions/billions in "licensing fees" to use "My" name. Essentially, they pay accountants (and Ireland) 2% to avoid paying actual taxes. Second, yes other countries do have these kinds of taxes, Australia on their citizens for one. Three, most economists don't agree on anything, just like "most" of any other non-hard science group. Physicists mostly agree on G and climatologists agree on AGW, but there's a pretty steep drop off beyond that stuff.
Finally, I think we can agree on the last point, but differ on interpretation. You appear to be saying that whatever third world hell hole (Sorry Ireland) their accountants claim is there "home" is what matters. I disagree. Where does Apple, Microsoft, etc sell the majority of its consumer products? Is it Ireland? Nevada? I don't think so. What is the citizenship of its majority stockholders? What country spends the most on military power, which is used to enforce and defend their intellectual "property"? I think those are the most salient points.
If Somalian based black flag maker "Ukata Dung Flags" makes his flags and sells them to local pirates, I don't the US should be taxing him. No one here who isn't trolling would suggest that. But if Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the Koch Bros were to suddenly claim they were based out of a dock in Somalia, I don't think we should say "Oh, cool! Yeah that $40Billion dollar licensing fee to "Legitimate Licensing Company" in Somalia is a legit business expense, no profit or tax for your American business necessary. Roads, Courts, Police and Fire all free on US! Plus warships to protect your IP, for free, of course."
A common thread I see in these anti-tax schemes is complaints about the current status, but I never a better solution being offered by the "Boo Government!" aka "Boo Taxes!" crowd. Plenty of wishful thinking along the lines of "Me and the boys have rifles and don't need cops!" crowd, all of whom would die to toxic inhalation from arson from more depraved versions of myself in a crisis, providing me with a ready stash of guns and beans. That or they reveal themselves to be cowardly murderers who kill anyone within sniping distance.
You are quite a successful example of the so called government 'education' system. Comparing individual responsibility to fascism? Fascism? Special interests (elite based factions) within government structures, ensuring the absolute authority of the state over the individual lives is in your little mind equal to individual freedom, freedom of association, freedom FROM the state? :) The government 'education' has done its job well on you, congrats.
You can't handle the truth.
Theft is what tax is, period. Roads, education, defence, health, food, transportation, energy, waste management, any service at all does not even closely require government, the only reason governments are all over these is because there is so much money that can be stolen by the power hungry who end up in government positions. Taxes are theft, they are actually slavery, as they are theft that is backed by initiation of violence that is seen as 'legitimate', since the mob supports it by participating in these systems.
You can't handle the truth.
Oh, by the way, talk about 'lack of sophistication'. A government that is running a deficit is overtaxing, since it is adding those expenses to the debt that has to be paid with interest and/or is inflating the currency supply (printing money), thus destroying value of everybody's earnings and investments, thus destroying investment opportunities and quality of life. I do not expect you actually to understand it, but just because you do not does not make the problem go away.
You can't handle the truth.
Can you cite anywhere where the Founding Fathers didn't believe in taxes? They're point want that taxes shouldn't be levied, but rather that there should be no taxation without representation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well then you're fucked, because no society like that has ever existed, or ever will exist.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And you're a product of sociopathy and idiocy. You're selfish, wvul and vile, and yet clearly enjoy the benefits or the society you revile. Worse than a moron, you are a hypocrite.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You are getting services and you pay for it through taxes. This does not fit any sensible definition of stealing. I can see that you are one of those libertarians that operate under the pretense that we would be better off with highways built by private parties for which you would have to pay a fee just like a tax to the government but with the difference that you have no say where it is built.
Fine, you are welcome to believe that. It still does not make takes theft or slavery. They are democratically agreed to and you get something in return for them. Let me know when a robber gives you back something in return for the stolen goods. That is how false your analogy is.
Actually my position is that we are in the early stages of developing that society, given that the next bubble bursting (as far as I am concerned) will be a government bubble. Government bonds, government fiat, government power and promises, government wars and murder and theft and destruction of individual rights.
As a humanity we have always been oppressed but over time we are moving from higher levels of oppression to lower levels (per individual) as our numbers are increasing, the ability to oppress individuals will diminish with a more global, more open society.
I actually am not pessimistic at all on this, I am quite optimistic where it concerns the future of individual freedoms being increased and government power being diminished.
You can't handle the truth.
You go to a restaurant and you do not cover the entire dinner bill. I.e you underpaid and ran a deficit. The restaurant then allows you to run a tab and charges you interest over the balance as it is done by any and all financial institutions. Now you are trying to use this as an argument that you "overpaid" the restaurant bill?
Try that in front of the court together with all your "sophistication" and you can write to me from jail telling me what the judge thought about your reasons for not covering the entire restaurant bill because you "overpaid".
The difference is that corporations (US C Corporations) are the imaginary invention of people, and this is also why they should not be taxed.
I imagine that all my corporations are in tax-friendly, business-friendly domicile. And if such a domicile does not exist, then imagine harder! This is the present state of corporate earnings management.
People, on the other hand, receive all the benefits of corporations. These benefits accrue as transactions, wages, dividends. Transactions and, to a degree, wages and dividends, are real, tangible things.
This is why taxing transactions (i.e. sales tax) can strive to meet standards of fairness and smartness, but taxing corporate profits will always lead to ridiculous outcomes.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
The most glaring point is of-course that there is no provision for income taxes by the Founders, in fact a number of times income taxes came to existence in USA and then were abolished. The latest attempt succeeded in 1913 (and coincided with the creation of the Fed and destruction of money). I wrote previously that income taxes are illegal and are collected illegally, maybe it is not the most eloquent expression presented there and I should rewrite it and make it easier to read, but it's there.
You can't handle the truth.
Corporate taxes are really just a way to tax individual shareholders, employees and customers, but without any of them noticing that the money is coming out of their pockets. Taxes are necessary, but hidden taxes are evil. Taxes should be visible, so the taxpayers know what they're paying and can weigh it against the value they receive, to decide if they're getting good value for their money, and vote accordingly.
This particular proposal is a great example. Obama wants to go after this particular pool of money because to American taxpayers it appears to be "free" money. It doesn't cost them anything... or at least that's how it looks. I suppose to the extent that this is taxing foreign income generated by foreign workers producing goods and services for sale to foreign customers, it is "free". The only Americans who will be hurt are the Americans who are shareholders in the targeted companies, and there are also plenty of foreign shareholders. So to the extent the money is all foreign, it's taken from foreign taxpayers, which is, if anything, even more insidious.
We do need to maintain our infrastructure, and we should pay for it. But up front and in the open.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Wrong, services that I WANT to buy I can buy on my own and they would be much cheaper and in more abundance and with more options if governments weren't creating monopolies to support inefficient companies in many sectors. Private roads, private health care, private energy, private transport, private food, private insurance, private education, private money, private law, private protection, private anything costs less and can be paid for as needed and in private sector nobody is forced to pay for anything they do not require or wish to use. There is a gigantic difference between voluntary purchase of services and being forced into group slavery by the mob and the power hungry politicians who get their power from the tacit complicity of the mob.
Democracy is mobocracy, it is dictatorial oppression of the minority by majority (in case if the majority votes) or at least of a voting majority and it is not in the best interest of an individual, it is slave ownership by proxy.
You can't handle the truth.
"oppressed by the mob to pay for nonsense that I have 0 interest in, actually less than 0 interest."
You can never exist in this state as long as other humans are alive. TF2 sniper said it best.
"cause at the end of the day, as long as there are two people left on the planet, someone is gonna want someone dead."
Even if you have 0 interest in something, others in the closed system have interest in you. It is inescapable. Make the best of it, ignore it at your peril.
Good-bye
Almost all of the design and administration of Apple is done in California. But surprisingly the "Company" is a foreign company where they have no factories, no designers, no corporate officers and just a bank account.
So yes, by using the talent and ingenuity of US workers and then claiming that they're an Irish Company they are stealing the value that US Society has invested into its workforce (and supplied the infrastructure for that workforce to get to the job site etc).
Personally I believe that we should tax not based on where they are located but where most of the value is created. If you are Microsoft and 90% of your workforce is in Washington State but you are incorporate in "Nevada" because you have a PO Box there then you should be taxed at 90% Washington 8% California and 2% Nevada tax rates. Similarly if 80% of your operations are in the US then you are 80% a US company and 80% of your revenue is taxable under US tax law.
Everybody knows that Apple is a California company. To say otherwise is dishonesty. It might legally be correct that Apple is a subsidiary of an Irish shell corporation but they're cheating the system and doing something that doesn't pass any sort of sniff test of truthfulness.
Funny you mention healthcare, where we have abundant data from all over the world that conclusively prove government provided healthcare is cheaper than privately provided one.
We have similar data for private energy, highways, and public transportation. For others the private sector is more efficient.
Those are the facts, the rest is foaming-at-the-mouth ideology.
I am completely against any sort of tax system where the government does this. If you do not like the corporations using loopholes in your laws close or heavily tax the loop holes. But don't just randomly throw a tax at people. The government should not have the power to randomly tax anyone it wants, any amount, at any length of notice it wants to give. If these assets should be taxed, then tax them annually.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Thank you.
Typically the point of a corporation is for the corporate assets and bank account to grow. Not for it is break even at the end of the year. What you are talking about is typically how a non-profit runs. A non-profit does not necessarily have to increasing its assets of bank balance year after year, instead it often balances the budget and pays as much in salaries as it takes in.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Or how about changing the tax code to treat corporations like citizens. Wasn't it the Citizens United decision by SCOTUS that gave them rights. It would be reciprocal and the IRS could companies like citizens and go after every cent regardless of where they live or where they have their money.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I wish I had said that.
Yes, but you do have to pay them back. 'forgiven' debts are simply passed on to the rest of us. The debt doesn't just disappear.
well, yeah, why wouldnt it be? why should the US get access to funds NOT even in the country? thats plain robbery
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Actually wrong, there are very few places that do not have government hands all over health care, education, transportation, energy, everything. The places where government hands are not elbow deep in these services are rare, but they exist. Singapore has very little involvement in health insurance, there is a basic required minimum insurance and everything else is voluntary. They also have no minimum wage and highest per capita earnings.
You can't handle the truth.
I take it Apple 'leeched of the society' by creating production lines and products that provide them with all their earnings around the world?
They certainly do avail themselves of the protections of intellectual property law, ultimately enforced by government intervention. Apple's owners also avail themselves of the protections of a corporate charter, provided by that same government. "Free market" is truly nothing of the sort, and there's always a line that free market advocates aren't willing to cross when it comes to getting the government completely out of the market. It's like the people that scream to "keep the government out of my Medicare!".
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Again, all of the western world provides government healthcare more efficiently than private health care in the US. This is an undisputed fact. By the way, of the public/private portions of healthcare in the US the government ones are the ones that provide the most bang for the buck. This has been confirmed in numerous studies, going all the way from medicare/medicaid/armed services insurance to Obamacare today.
I know you will refuse to believe it. It is clear you care more for ideology than reality.
I am an individual first of all, I act with my own self interest in mind, that is simply a fact. Everything else is your opinion and it's not an informed one. However I am far away from a hypocrite, I actually do as I say as much as I possibly can, from the way I structure my business to my personal life, I am quite good at following my own advice.
You can't handle the truth.
You really think that if taxes were zero, that any of the revenues would flow through to labor? ahahahhahaha I got a bridge for sale too
C|N>K
You are correct about one thing: there is no way to ignore the system, the only real question to yourself is what are you doing in your life about it, how do you ensure that your losses are minimised in this socialist/fascist nightmare of a system (and I am quite positive things are actually getting better over time, not worse, in the last 300 years markets have been freer than ever and individual property rights have been exercised more than ever before, of-course the last 40 years, since the default on the gold dollar the things went downhill quite a bit in the American and European parts of the world, but they have been getting better in Asia and parts of Africa).
You can't handle the truth.
so wouldnt the right thing to do is stop shipping money to washington to divy up around the country?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Western world is seeing its economies being destroyed and not in small part due to welfare state policies of that world. The government and health care or insurance should not be mixed. Same applies to everything, including military at this point as far as I am concerned, at least if the idea is to keep peace rather than increase violence and murder. The reality is the problem for you, not me, you don't actually pay attention to the reality and the reality is bigger than only health care, it is the entire state of economy and health care is not outside of the economy. I prefer to use private health care specifically because of much better quality and given choices people would take that option, their choices are removed from them by their governments and by the declining economy, which is again, resulting from their government growth and destruction of free market capitalism.
You can't handle the truth.
Ok, now take your analogy and add the following: if you are constantly eating on 'the tab', while you are no longer being productive, you lost your job, you ate through your assets, you have nothing left and your skills are deteriorating, the restaurant would be full-hearty to keep feeding you there, thinking that you would ever pay any of that debt back.
You can't handle the truth.
If these capitalist leaders are given a one-time tax that they'll fight in court, screw them -- give them a tax every year. Because while it's a capitalist success to buy the legislature and write laws that allow you to keep huge profits out of the US government's hands, it's unpatriotic to screw America for billions in uncollected taxes only gained by successfully manipulating our legislature and screwing American workers.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
And then there is a simple penalty.... You don't have a headquarters here in the US you don't sell a product here.... there are all sorts of cat and mouse games that can be played.
The us is one of the biggest with the most expendable income. It's financial suicide to not sell a product here. And as has been seen in the past.. when one company leaves here... another will spring up to do it's job here.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
You are now changing the subject. since you cannot deny that government provided health-care is cheaper, so off you go about the economic crisis, the welfare state and other side issues.
Thanks for participating dude. So much for your (false) assumption that private healthcare is cheaper.
And then there is a simple penalty.... You don't have a headquarters here in the US you don't sell a product here.... there are all sorts of cat and mouse games that can be played.
Really? :)))) That would make for one EMPTY WalMart, wouldn't it?
Go ahead, think through that once more, you like your stuff that you buy every day in any store in USA? Most of it was NOT made in America.
You can't handle the truth.
If I'm a shareholder of a US corporation, I expect to have corporate earnings on their way to *me* (my pocket, from dividends). Sure it takes a while for earnings to trickle down to dividends or higher share price, but that link is there.
If earnings are systematically never coming into the US, how the heck am I (the shareholder) supposed to benefit from those foreign earnings? We're not talking about a company headquartered abroad (or owned primarily by foreigners). We're talking about *my* shares earning profits that I won't have access to unless the damn company pays taxes.
No, the arguments of "if you don't like that, don't buy the stock" doesn't work. The whole point of shares is a say, a vote, not the option of not to play.
Yes--there are much better ways of structuring the tax system, but there's a huge amount of institutional momentum behind the current system.
For example, if you used pass-through tax for corporations like you do for LLCs and partnerships. The corporations would then have to distribute money in dividends to cover their tax liability, the government would collect income taxes from the owners (the shareholders).
Government provided health care is not cheaper. FDA is not cheaper, government laws and taxes and regulations do not make things cheaper, they either make things impossible or much more expensive than otherwise.
You are full of statistics, aren't you? Private health care, actually private, without government intervention cannot be beat by price by any government health care at all, given that TAX AND REGULATIONS COSTS ARE HIDDEN FROM SIGHT.
You can't handle the truth.
Without the government, apple wouldn't be able to exist.
There is nothing to stop widespread theft of their IP by other countries (can you say "Patent protection for 0 years).
There is nothing to stop widespread copyright infringement of their products.
There is nothing to stop people from kidnapping and/or murdering their top employees.
There is nothing to stop people from attacking apple stores and destroying product.
The roads fall into disrepair.
There's no guarantee of the quality of gasoline in their delivery vehicles.
A functioning government is necessary for businesses to exist.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
. Implying that they didn't object to paying taxes as much as they objected paying taxes to the wrong people for the wrong reasons and without any say-so in the matter.
I know its not relevant to what the guy you are replying to said, but this line is a perfect fit for the issue at hand. The issue is that the feds want to tax something that they have no legitimate reason to tax, meaning money that was made outside of the country.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Republicans have sold their souls to their corporate masters. That does not mean we should simply accept it and sit tightly. We should make it obvious to people where the loyalties of Republicans lie.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You are now arguing that deficits are bad, which is a different topic.
Presently we are running a deficit, which is the mathematical definition of underpaying, not overpaying.
Is that how you justify to yourself ignoring indisputable facts from the world over as well as the USA?
Whatever it takes just so you don't pop your ideological bubble that everything private is cheaper even though facts speak to the contrary?
Okaay.
I run a business and I hire people in more than one country to do it as well.
Is it a sole proprietorship? If not, why not?
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Yes, deficits are bad. Yes, running deficits and adding to debts means higher future payments due to interest on the debt and it means higher future taxes.
In order to restart economic activity debts have to be paid off and/or restructured, debts have to be minimised and deficits have to stop.
Running deficits means taxing future earnings at a higher rate than the current tax rate, that's because debts cannot be accrued forever and it's not fake 'borrowing ceiling' that governments don't care about, it's the real lending ceiling that will be imposed by people who will no longer subsidise your economy with their productivity.
Cutting taxes and increasing debt based spending or inflation based spending is not cutting taxes at all, which is why Bush never actually cut taxes, he increased them by increasing spending.
USA is now the biggest debtor in history of the world and his happened since Nixon defaulted on the dollar in 1971 and the inflation started wiping out USA economy.
You can't handle the truth.
Yes, hypocrisy is amusing, however there is no hypocrisy with a company that earned money in a foreign country not bringing its profits to USA so they can avoid paying those taxes.
As to the corporate charter provided by government - this shouldn't exist.
There shouldn't be intellectual property law - this shouldn't exist.
Free market is exactly absence of government creating monopolies, destroying competition, taxing income and profit and wealth, meddling with businesses, passing labour laws, etc.
There shouldn't be any government and there shouldn't be such a thing as 'limited liability' provided by government corporate law.
You can't handle the truth.
In the very long term, the burden is likely to be shifted in part to labor, if the corporate tax dampens capital accumulation.
Labor doesn't pay taxes either. Take more out of my paycheck and I'll buy less of your (corporate) junk.
It's silly to think of someone or something paying taxes. Its all a cycle and taxes represent a drag or inefficiency in the transfer of funds no matter where they are applied. Common sense (and equity) demands that we spread the tax burden across as many transfer events as possible. That means personal as well as corporate income taxes.
The point that many people are missing about this 'Obama Tax' is that it appears to be a federal tax on wealth, not transfers. And that is problematic. State and local governments have various forms of wealth taxes (property), but the feds do not. Even inheritance and capital gains taxes are triggered by transfer events. This makes the proposed tax a disturbing precedent.
Have gnu, will travel.
A non-profit does not necessarily have to increasing its assets of bank balance year after year,
Counter example: churches.
Have gnu, will travel.
It is a set of corporations, parent corporation and a number of daughter businesses set up to minimise taxes and other types of liabilities. It is what I have to work with in the current environment. I prefer bearer certificates personally, they are a bit difficult to set up today. I prefer it if governments didn't exit at all and there was no such thing as a government controlled corporate charter of-course, given that the world is what it is, I come up with the best way of doing business I can in our reality.
You can't handle the truth.
You are correct. A fair tax code will tax all types of income and transactions at the same rate so that there is no incentive to hide, dodge, and evade at the expense of investing in your organization and paying dividends to your shareholders. A smart and far tax code will set the tax rate to be about the same as those of foreign jurisdictions to avoid pushing capital offshore.
If there were a flat (say 15 or 20 pct) tax on income, capital gains, and foreign purchases sold to americans, etc, there would be no way to dodge and no incentive to go offshore, because the tax rates elsewhere are the same, and there's no way to structure a payment or income source in a way that avoids taxation at some point along the money's route. The only way it escapes taxation is if it is flat-out transfered abroad and stays there, at which point it gets taxed abroad at a comparable rate.
But then the tax lawyers would be out of work, and guess who tends to run for Congress?
Still a dumb idea, no matter where it came from.
Everything private is cheaper in a free market economy. In a non-free market economy (which is what is set up almost everywhere across the world), private companies can manipulate governments to their advantage by buying influence and thus preventing actual competition.
FDA is there to prevent competition, so is every other law and tax, preventing actual competition creates a skewed market, in which it is impossible to get a true reading on what costs are actually.
Same with any government operation, money is fungible, so government operations are subsidised in more ways than one. Since there are very few actual free markets and that health care is not allowed to operate as a free market almost anywhere at all, comparing private health care in a non-free market and declaring that government beats free-market private health care is in itself a gigantic lie that you prefer to promote, that's your business, but you are not going to fog this issue that way for me.
You can't handle the truth.
This is just one more episode in the perpetual game of cat and mouse between the makers and the takers.
You're completely off-base on the Hillary thing. To help Hillary, Obama need to take the party further left. It relates to the concept of the Overton window , the range of ideas that the public sees as palatable "centrist" positions. If you drag the dialog of the extreme edge further, then it makes less extreme ideas seem more reasonable. The Democrats need to get on this, as the right has been doing this for some time. People like Limbaugh and Hannity push the edges out so their candidates don't have to.
By pushing "anti-business claptrap" Obama gives her room to distance herself from him, room she can use in the election as she sees fit.
Personally, I don't feel that closing tax loopholes exploited by multinationals is "anti-business", more like "pro-fairness", if you allow one business to cheat, you force all to cheat to stay competitive.
It's simply an extension of America's weird world view that they should be owed taxes on money not earned in America. No other country has this odd view, instead, money earned abroad is taxed abroad. The US tax system also has weirdnesses like this for anyone who's a dual national or green card holder... Dual US/British citizen and earning money in Britain? Great, you'll be paying both UK and US income tax on that!
That is a very different issue. That is just about you picking loyalty to a country. When you have dual citizenship, who do you vote for? Who do you fight for in a war draft? Which government is responsible for you?
What is going on here is corporations having a token office and token holding company incorporation papers in whatever country has little taxes or little accounting oversite and exploiting
How Apple avoids paying taxes on iTunes revenue Luxembourg served as one of Apple’s overseas tax havens from September 2008 until December of last year, giving the company a 1.2% corporate tax rate. Over two-thirds of Apple’s European revenue from iTunes was routed through its Luxembourg holding company called iTunes Sarl . Apple has since moved the holding company to Ireland where it pays less than one percent tax on iPhone and iPad sales. http://www.cultofmac.com/30265...
THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM. Example: We subsidize education with tax dollars so people can get good enough jobs in future to buy iphones and design iphones, then we tax that corporate revenue to pay for the subsidization. This is basically making everyone elses tax burden higher. This isn't a 2 trillion money steal, it is money they would have owed in any rational system anyways,
How’s this for fair share: corporations used to pay 27% of the taxes in this country, and now they pay 7%.
I’d argue that they were paying their “fair share” when they paid 27%, rather than the 7% they pay now. They use the roads more and the courts more than the average citizen does.
Let's just be like the rest of the world and stop taxing corporations. We'll save billions on trying to collect.
Then, tax capital gains like every other income. And jack up the maximum tax bracket. 50% at 1MM. No tax shelters. None. Only exception is unincorporated small business which can be inherite exempt up to 10MM.
Labor is a poor man's capital. A rich man's capital should be taxed at the same rate.
If the GOP likes the 1950s so much, let's tax them like it is the 1950s.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
It’s part of the budget, which the President submits to Congress. I’m pretty sure that counts as talking to them.
Congress can always strip it out, but there’s nothing requiring the President to sign that modified budget, and then we’re right back to CRs to pay for everything, like we’ve been doing for the past several years.
If you are responsible to the shareholders to be stewards of their investments, you have to take whatever measures you can to avoid heavier than necessary taxes. Hence people park their money off American shores.
Oh pleaseeee. Where is your sense of civics? If they want to live and work and raise kids in Colombia, then let them. But they want to live in the United States with US citizenship, that made it's self powerful with a expensive navy, that provided a stable government, that gave them peace of mind, etc, etc. Then live with American higher taxes. It's not like the shareholders are going to be staving. And sense only the mega corps can afford these tax havens anyways, it's really just another way to be anti-free market, by playing by different rules. It's people like you that will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Ah, Atlas Shrugged. Written by a sociopath, rule book for the selfish, prized tome to Libertarian wackos everywhere.
Go ahead, you John Galts! Take your ball and leave, like a four year-old throwing a tantrum.
You THINK that you’re special, but the truth is you’re completely disposable. There are a hundred Americans just waiting to take your place with great ideas and hard work. Perhaps they’ll even do your work better than you could.
As an entrepreneur, I relish this mindset, as I don’t have to compete against pouting quitters.
You won’t be missed.
So your theory of tax fairness is based on infrastructure usage cost? The foreign transactions with foreigners should be 0% taxed, by that metric, and probably there goes progressive taxation on personal incomes too...
I would like to be a fly on the wall when this is explained to Tim Cook or Eric Schmidt.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
No, those would be examples to support my argument, the total argument itself.
It DOES read "Designed by Apple in California" on the box for every hardware product Apple makes. So, by your argument, shouldn't Apple pay US and California state taxes on every hardware product it sells, no matter where?
Liberty means no ex post facto laws. Earnings made before passage of any such law (which, let's face it, will NEVER pass with the current Congress - whether you agree with them or not) should be excluded from this. If the Government can retroactively tax your profits,
This isn't a retroactive tax.
There's no ex post facto involved.
You see, the trick is that technically, all the money held overseas is deferred income.
The IRS said "you don't have to pay your taxes until you bring the money back to US shores."
The corporations said "Cool, we'll bring it back. No really, we will. But how about we pay you less when we bring it back?"
As a result, the incentives for repatriating foreign profits are completely upside down and backwards.
It makes far more sense to dodge US corporate taxes and invest the money overseas.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Having had a long interest in pottery, I've looked at some of the history of pottery in Japan. Interestingly, in the late 1500s, Japan invaded Korea and while they didn't get much territory-wise, they rounded up a lot of potters and forced them give up their knowledge in Japan. Pottery was high technology in those days. Anyway, kidnapping knowledgable workers is a time honored tradition.
The example I reference is usually called the Pottery Wars, rather than "Ceramic Wars" but there's a short synopsis here: The Ceramic Wars: Hideyoshi's Japan Kidnaps Korean Artisans
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This 14% to 19% is closer to the USA's 'real' tax rate, which has so many loopholes that it's actually lower than most of the developed world.
People love to harp on the fact that the USA's corporate tax rate is so high, but it truth with all the political rewriting of the corporate tax rate its fairly low.
And then you have companies like Apple doing their all out best to not pay taxes at all.
The last is what Obama is trying to remove. And Republicans/Fox News and it's handlers are going to try their level best to sell the American People that this is a bad thing to fairly tax the poor super-corporations that get away with bloody murder.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
On the "design" part, i.e., salaries of the designers, Apple & the employees pay tax aplenty already.
Because the tax on citizens is already retarded and no other country is that retarded. The fix is to get rid of that retardation, not spread it to corporations.
*That* is an argument that is very possibly worth making.
I have an even better idea. Tax only the corporations, and none of the natural persons. These artificial entities control the majority of the money, by far. Let them pay the taxes.
How exactly is risking capital to produce products people willfully buy "leaching off society"? Which government service exactly are they skipping out on paying for? Why not send them a bill for that instead of stabbing in the dark at arbitrary sums? When did it become "greedy" to keep your own money, and "justice" to take someone else's?
Whoosh much? I was referring to the strawman kleptocrat government badguys in the book as the source of Obama's inspiration.
If the US imposes this tax, while crediting the company for any tax paid overseas, then the smartest response would be for the foreign taxing jurisdiction to impose its own 19% tax rate and just take the money for itself. The company ends up no worse off, and the country where the money is gets the dough instead of the US. Or maybe US companies will just reorganize and make their foreign operations separate corporations and take shares in them instead of keeping all that stuff under one corporate roof.
Big business and the billionaire class has taken the difference and none of that has ended up in the workers hands. We are working longer and harder and our lives are getting worse.
"Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming"
I am not really here right now.
Whoosh much? I was referring to "Libertarian wackos" not "RightwingNutjobs."
You're joking, right? I get to deduct the salaries I pay employees, but I still have to pay corporate income tax on my profits, after deductions.
That may not be the way you want the world to be, but that's the way it is right now.
You were implying that because apple products were supposedly designed in the states, this taints them with such a strong us nexus that foreign sales to foreign individuals should naturally be included in apple's us taxes. Because Design!
You've changed tacks a couple of times now. Try a third one, maybe it'll be less of a reach.
You'll see every major company in the world immediately relocate to the US..
No, you won't.
What bizarre world do you people live in, anyway?
Ali Baba will remain a Chinese company. ICBC will remain a Chinese company. China Construction Bank will remain a Chinese company. Agricultural Bank of China will remain a Chinese company. Bank of China will remain a Chinese company. PetroChina will remain a Chinese company. So will every other Chinese company. Fully half of the top 10 of the Forbes 2000 list will not EVER become American companies.
Royal Dutch Shell will remain a Dutch company. Toyota Motor (Forbes says their name has no 's' on the end. Who knew..) will remain a Japanese company. HSBC Holdings will remain a British company. BP will remain a British company. Volkswagen Group will remain a German company. Gazprom will remain a Russian company. Samsung will remain a Korean company. We're now through a majority of the top 20 with absolutely zero chance of relocating to the US, regardless of US tax policy.
That's just the publicly traded companies. Saudi Aramco will stay in Saudi Arabia. They own that government. They ARE that government. The LEGO Group will stay in Denmark. Etc.
When you get right down to it, it's mostly only US corporations that are sociopathic bastards. Many large foreign companies identify with their own nationality and explicitly support it. Do you really think Royal Bank of Canada (55th ranked in the Forbes 2000) is going to incorporate in the US? Really? Don't be ridiculous.
Your back of the envelope calculation is worth spit. A zero US corporate tax rate would simply rob our budget of billions. Billions that, whether or not they are necessary, are already spent, so we'd damn well better not cripple our ability to pay back the loans.
No seriously man. I wasn't saying it as an attack.
I'm saying it like- seek help. The views you are expressing are very far from reality. This is dangerous to you. You are thinking in a bubble isolated from reality.
Not joking. Not attacking you.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm just goofing around with you, don't be a brick, and try reading for content.
If a U.S. company designs products in one country, manufactures them in another country, and sells them in a third, in which jurisdiction should the company pay tax? The country in which it's domiciled?
I have no problem with Apple paying federal income tax on every product designed in the U.S., and then paying sales taxes or VAT to the governments of the countries in which those goods are sold. I don't think the country of manufacture should matter at all when it comes to determination of corporate income tax.
Apple is a U.S. corporation. So long as it reaps the benefits of incorporating here, they have to pay for it.
So who do I pay for protection from bandits using civil assets forfeiture?
"Untaxed" foreign earnings. Does that mean not taxed at all, or not taxed by the US? (They may well have been taxed in the foreign country they were earned in. If they weren't, I'm sure those foreign countries would love to know about it given that it was earned there and then shipped out of the country.)
What you have here is a problem of a global economy trying to deal with local taxation, and maybe even an attempt to double-tax.
If you're a large company that deals internationally, you have two options. Set up a company in each country and have them pay the tax of the local country, or set up one company and then pay the tax in EITHER those foreign countries or the home country of the company, depending on how you declare it.
For a company to have foreign earnings that are untaxed, they either have a home country that's not being paid tax (Why not? What kind of stupid taxation system is that if they're clearly based there, wherever they do business?), or they're not paying proper taxes in the foreign country (same parenthesised comment applies here).
I'm sure there are a lot of companies not paying proper tax. Starbucks weren't paying millions in tax in the UK because all their profits went to their US division as "payment for intellectual property rights" (i.e. Starbucks US let Starbucks UK use the Starbucks name for the small price of 100% of their profit, thus making them a zero-profit entity in the UK and not liable to UK tax, which is obviously a scam and should be legislated against).
But if you have to do a one-off tax to make things right, that means your everyday tax is slowly cocking things up ALL the time. And how long because the next "one-off" tax?
So now you have no benefits that aren't costing you tax from your salary too. So the value of the benefits plummets and thus people just demand a higher salary instead. Which, believe it or not, costs you more - the point of the incentives is that the person couldn't just earn that amount of money extra and get that incentive themselves anyway, it works by having expensive one-offs that mortals couldn't afford, and them remaining company property, etc.
You can't make outsourcing illegal. It's just a legal minefield and there's always a way around it. It would also cripple any modern economy overnight. This is truly a stupid suggestion in its own right.
End visas? No problem. But there aren't many countries in the world that have put a block on visas because they already have enough in-house talent. Believe it or not, this will make immigration drop which, again, will cost you all money.
The numbers may look bigger on the balance sheet, but the costs go up as well and may not be immediately noticeable.
The stock/futures things? Too complicated for me to tell what would happen, to be honest. Chances are there's a way to scam it to make enormous profit and not pay tax on it.
However, if you just tax the companies properly - a fixed portion of their income earned or brought into the country, and a definition of income that excludes any kind of "pay your own subsidiary" shenanigans - the prices for the consumer may well go up. But equally consumers will go elsewhere.
And maybe, just maybe, like Starbucks UK, you'll find that the prices have gone up because NOW they have to pay the right amount of tax. And if that means they can't be profitable, then their competitors who HAVE been paying the right amount of tax all along will win (e.g. Costa Coffee in the UK), because they can compete on a level playing field finally.
Tax isn't complicated. A fixed portion of what you earn. It's that simple. The problem is that to get their own 10% the lawmakers and accountants make things incredibly complicated to define exactly what you've earned. And they wrap it up in a thousand tiny taxes rather than one big tax.
Can someone explain why it wouldn't be better to have a "personal income tax" and a "corporate income tax" and scrap everything else? It's used for disincentives (e.g. tax on smoking in the UK) but, honestly, is that really worth it compared to just banning it or letting the markets speak?
It took 40 years to get to the point where smoking costs us more as a country than it makes in tax, and now we have a huge legacy of health problems ahead of us and STILL we haven't properly banned it but pissed away money on disincentives like plain packaging, hiding them away in the store, stopping their advertising, removing their capability to sponsor, etc.
I can't help but think that just the simplicity of "half what you earned" (which is about right for most first-world countries) would cut out so much red tape, confusion, administration and difficult enforcement that it would actually get you back MORE than all this complicated mess of exclusions and kickbacks that are in place now.
I pay road tax (road fund licence, technically, but it's a tax on road use the proceeds of which go to road maintenance - no different to taxing road use and the government having to maintain the roads generally), income tax, national insurance (healthcare tax), VAT (sales tax), a specific tax on petrol, a tax on pensions, a tax on insurances, a tax on bank interest and god-knows what else.
"How much money did you make from all sources last year? Give me half" seems to be pretty much the same as we have now, but without all this mess of shit to fall foul of and allow companies to scam.
Except that it is much easier for a corporation to make profits disappear overseas on paper than it is for an individual. I cannot open a "Me Inc." in Ireland and pay Me 90% of my income as a licensing fee on me, the trademark and then deduct it from my taxes here.
Possibly.
Ditto
BLOCKQUOTE>Will he be rescued by the US military if kidnapped in Iraq?
Extremely unlikely.
I lived in Venezuela during the military coup of 2002. The US embassy actually did make arrangements to potentially helicopter out US citizens if the situation got bad enough. So they do look out for US citizens abroad, when possible. I would call in twice a day to determine whether or not I was supposed to try and escape the country. And no, I was not a US Government employee there at the time.
Free market is exactly absence of government...
Sorry but that's the Fox news definition.
"Free" - as in anyone is free to participate in the market.
"Market" - A set of rules governing trade, normally created and enforced by governments, eg: property law.
In other words the all too common Fox definition of "free market" is actually an oxymoron.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"If a U.S. company designs products in one country, manufactures them in another country, and sells them in a third, in which jurisdiction should the company pay tax? The country in which it's domiciled?"
Why, none of the above. Taxes should be on consumption or cost-recovery basis or something ... Oh, but you don't mean "should, according to fche", but "should, according to law". Why, then the Double Irish is perfectly right. Oh, but you don't mean "should, according to law", but "should, according to macsimon". Well, then obviously they should pay 100% of their net income as tax, because that's fair.
Royal Bank of Canada is already incorporated in the US. As are most of the other companies you list, sans most of the Chinese ones (banks, telecoms, and oil companies are State-owned). It would be trivial for them to move their board membership/executives to the US as they are already incorporated in the US.
Alibaba and many of the private Chinese companies are actually based in tax havens like Hong Kong, Bermuda, or Cayman Islands for a reason - to reduce taxation. Most companies are not so loyal as you imply - the actual facts of their incorporation showing as much...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If the goal is to drive "multinational companies screwing over US taxpayers" completely out of the US, this is the perfect solution.
FTFY
If they were investing it then it wouldn't be profit and people would care less. They're sitting on massive cash reserves, which ties up the money needlessly. It's bad for the country, bad for the stockholders (since it isn't being invested or used for dividends) , and ultimately bad for the companies since they should be investing to grow. But since it looks good on a balance sheet and a lot of investors can't be bothered to look past a quarterly report a lot of companies with crappy executives and boards will keep doing it.
just came here to say ...
undergrad macroecon was several years ago. but one of the things i remember him lecturing on was, that companies don't pay tax.
sure you can levy a tax on them, but in the end it somehow just gets passed on to the consumer.
sure it sounds nice, using big numbers, lets hit up big corp.'s. but it will just raise the cost of goods, and make bigger businesses not want to do business here.
Why do you think companies become "multinational" to start with? And if you run multinationals completely out of the US, then you'll never get ANY tax out of them.
There are several possible answers to that. You can find some of them in Rothbard's "For a New Liberty".
That's a false dichotomy. Far from facing the choice between the imperfect government we have and "truly horrible dictatorships", in fact, our imperfect government is inching gradually closer to those "truly horrible dictatorships".
There are other ways. You do not need a big, powerful, centralized government to ensure property rights, freedom from violence, or economic growth. Quite the opposite: the government we have is a big impediment to all three objectives.
And in what sense are they "conceived and developed here in the US"? A large part of US R&D staff is immigrants to begin with.
Furthermore, if you think that this entitled the US to grab large amounts of taxes on foreign income, companies will do the economically rational thing and make sure that those inventions are "conceived and developed" elsewhere. Is that what you want? Discourage companies from doing R&D in the US?
FTFY. Government is the highway bandits.
People can easily privately pay for physical protection and it works; in fact, most companies already have to do that because police is utterly ineffective in protecting them. The main "highway bandits" people have to worry about these days is patent trolls, bogus lawsuits, and power-hungry regulators; far from being protected from those by government, government is the instrument by which those operate.
If a company was foolish enough to stuff money into a mattress, the money would effectively simply cease to exist; that is, the buying power of everybody else's money would simply adjust to make up for what they aren't spending.
What companies actually do when they don't invest money in the market (which is productive) is buy T-bills and similar instruments; they do that whenever the government promises them a higher rate of return on government debt than they think they can get from productive investment after taxes. That is, they finance government debt with it. And, of course, government debt is a highly unproductive investment vehicle because most government spending is wasted for unproductive purposes.
You want to encourage productive investments? Strongly reduce government spending (and reduce corporate taxes). Ironically, it's usually the same people who spew this bullshit about companies not making productive investments who favor the government policies that cause companies not to make productive investments in the first place!
Let's see if I've got this right:
GM builds a plant in China
They build a car in that plant
They sell that car to a Chinese customer
They turn a profit on the sale of that car... And keeps that profit in China.
Who do they owe taxes to, the Asian country they built and sold the car in, the U.S. Gov't, or both?
Now, different example:
BMW builds a plant in South Catolina
BMW builds a car in that plant in South Carolina
BMW sells that car to a customer in South Carolina
BMW makes a profit on the sale of that car... And keeps the profits in South Carolina.
Who do they owe taxes to? The U.S. Gov't, the German Gov,t, or both?
In the first example, this administration says both... In the second, it's the US only.
Ken
Social Security and Medicare costs are only going to get worse as our population ages. And those costs are what is really tanking the federal budget.
I don't think that SS or Medicare are a part of the annual budget. I think those are separate and fully operate when the government shuts down because a budget has not passed.
Could be wrong though.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The real issue is that everyone wants services but no one wants to pay taxes for those services. Not the corporations. Not the rich. Not the middle class. The poor will always get screwed no matter what. We borrow and spend, hoping that the check never arrives.
Most of these tax avoidance schemes depend on the fact that corps pay tax only on excess profits. They don't pay tax on income, like, you know, *people* do. Notice that it's always unambiguous where revenue from, so a corporate *income* tax would be relatively loophole-free. Yeah, yeah, we'd have to drop the rates substantially, since corps pay such a low effective tax (relative to revenue) today.
You are talking to a guy who seriously believes that Gilded Age was the most awesome period in the history of the USA ever. Don't waste your breath.
Does he get to use US Embassies?
How does one use an embassy?
As an expat, there are a very small number of reasons (I forget, maybe 4 or 5) that I will even be allowed into the embassy. Basically, my US passport will get me a ticket out of the country if WWIII starts, but other than that, the fact that the embassy exists is of absolutely no day-to-day use to me.
Embassy Services
That page shows a picture of a helicopter saving a US Citizen hurt in the earthquake in Haiti. US Citizens got helicopters, everybody else got Cholera. Sounds like a decent benny.
The fix to this is to implement a really high tax rate (say 90%) on licensing fees paid to foreign companies. Suddenly it becomes less expensive for apple/google/etc. to try and funnel money out of the country and they pay US corporate taxes on money earned in the US. (also a 90% inheritance tax on inheritance over, say, $10M, would go a long way to fixing the dangerous imbalance of wealth, but that's another story...)
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
Keep on chugging that koolaid. But there's no possible way Apple Australia earns $6 billion locally, with our local 20% corporate tax rate, yet somehow only pays $80.3 million in taxes.
It's bullshit, and everybody knows it. Except you, apparently.
Maybe a lobbyist?
Government shouldn't be protecting anybody in business for any reason, including 'intellectual property' nonsense.
Gasoline quality and whatever other quality, all of it is up to private brands to maintain and compete upon.
So brand A maintains good quality gasoline. Brand B simply sells under brand A - because there is no one to enforce the intellectual property - trademark of brand A. So how is brand A supposed to convince its buyers that this gasoline is of the quality that brand A is supposed to be known for?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Actually essential liberty is not having your property and earnings stolen from you by any government.
Although I admit this is a subjective statement you just made, I still think it's complete bullshit. Not having your earnings taxed has never been an "essential liberty", and I am aware of no major society on this planet that doesn't tax.
... USA. It's trying to steal money that was earned from foreign operations from foreign customers.
Although I presume your'e trolling, you should realize from the article and all of the comments that all of us are actually considering the money that is actually made in America but not taxed (hidden by the double Irish scheme for example).
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
God bless you, sir.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Have you ever been to Southern Mexico? You'll see just how well the absence of a federal government, a functioning Mafia, and private cartels do for a society.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
An American company can make a profit in Norway using Danish workers and pay it out to a shareholder in Brazil, and yet pay US taxes. Also, you might think that corporate taxes are paid by shareholders, but mostly they come out of wages. This paper comes to a figure of 75% out of wages: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/ideas-... . Why should Danish workers and Brazilian shareholders pay US taxes on work done in Norway?
Defining 'profit', never mind 'profit in country x', is difficult and this is easy to abuse. It's not progressive (it doesn't depend on the income of whoever pays it) and is one of the easier taxes to avoid.
A better system would be to use your income tax system to tax the dividends received by your residents and scrap corporate taxes. It removes a whole layer of bureaucracy, avoidance and international tax competition. With a very small number of exceptions, most people will not emigrate to avoid tax in the way that companies do. And it's fairer: labour income is far more heavily taxed than other kinds and there should be some equalization (it should, of course, be combined with equalization with taxes on interest, capital gains and so on).
Ever read the Diamond Age by (Neal Stephenson I think)? It has a very realistic proposal of a future in which the collapse of governments happens due to the inability for governments to collect taxes based on hypothetical Bitcoin technologies. In fact, in this realistic future, people still do continue to exist, and (some of them) do indeed have individual freedoms. The governments of said future are actually akin to collective corporations. The problem is that it's like Atlas Shrugged; it's fiction. In fact, we have proof of the reality of a lack of government: the first 100,000 years of humanity.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Well, the issue that so many Slashdotters are up in arms about is a very relevant issue to the tech industry in America. You say that there is no legitimate reason to tax, but what everyone is arguing is that the business IS done here, but accounting witchcraft makes it seem like it's not.
Now, there are plenty of legitimate arguments about certain topics such as the iPhone which is manufactured elsewhere, but the reality is is that there are a lot of American corporations who pay little to no taxes while making tons of money while benefiting from the American government. Many shades of gray? Yes. Feds wanting to tax something that they don't have a legitimate reason tax? Actually not so gray; there are legitimate problems with the tax system that the feds feel like they need to clamp down on.
Now, don't take what I say to be an approval for high taxes or in fact taxes at all; what I'm saying is that you are dismissing the argument of tax loopholes as invalid when in fact there are serious problems that could be solved and simplified for the greater benefit of both American corporations and the American society.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Oh why do you post anonymously? Great argument.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
I would rather the current government not only be dissolved but replaced by a fully transparent institution that actually protects everyone's rights equally.
Just curious, how exactly would you do that? A democracy? An oligarchy? Even if you had 24/7 monitoring, how exactly would you give such an entity the ability to protect yourself from bad guys and also defend the rights of Muslims and gays equally without bias?
This is not a troll question, this is actually a question that comes up a bunch when drinking with my buddies.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Anarchists are mostly irrational leftists, who want to destroy what they don't understand (property rights for example).
How are property rights defended if not with taxes?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Pretty much. it is so stupid that both parties are doing this stuff. They should compromise instead of trying to dominate each other. It is deeply destructive to keep engaging in this behavior and that the dems especially don't acknowledge it is a threat to the republic itself.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
He's not going to veto a budget over this and if he does it will hurt him and his political party worse then the opposition.
This manic berserker invincibility that democrats seem to believe they enjoy is just a PCP delusion. You're flipping furniture over feeling great but you're falling apart. You are ripping yourself apart. You are ripping your tendons and breaking your own bones. You are killing your political coalition. And the longer you stay in denial on the issue the worse the damage is going to get.
Calm down. Wipe the foam off your lips. Be rational. Work within the limitations of your means. You do not have dictatorial powers. Stop pretending that you do.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Both parties are in bed with corporations. Pretending otherwise is ignorant. And in any case they're free to petition the government or express their opinions. To suggest otherwise would be a violation of basic civil rights.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Talking at congress before the media is not the same thing as talking with anyone.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
And since the massive tax hit is the reason why they are keeping those funds overseas, what's to stop them from moving their corporate headquarters overseas to continue avoiding it?
This isn't to stop those companies that are abusing the system on any level.
This is to give them a giant windfall for the YEARS they have been exploiting it, to let them come back and "start fresh" again with zero taxes and do it all over again. This is another tax amnesty for those who have exploited tax loopholes.
Will someone please force that goddamned nigger to go back to Kenya before he completely ruins our country?
Fata viam invenient.
There are bad taxes, extremely bad taxes and hideously evil taxes. The inflation tax is the most evil and pernicious of all because it is so subtle and the mechanism so complex that people either don't know it's happening or don't understand how/why it's happening.
The income tax is the extremely bad tax. We should repeal the personal and corporate income tax entirely. You tax tobacco to dissuade smoking. Do you tax income and profit to dissuade working and producing? Replace the personal and corporate income tax with the "fair tax". (fairtax.org).
The least-bad taxes are consumption and use taxes. Want to build infrastructure? Raise the damned gas tax already! Make the people who use the service pay for it.
Despite the conventional economic idiocy, you cannot build a sustainable economy based on consumption when the bulk of the goods you are consuming are imported. The dirty little secret of the U.S. economy is that all of this spending, starting around the mid 1980s, and most of the so-called "GDP Growth" has been nothing but a massive bubble of consumer and government debt. Want to see a scary chart? Plot annual increases in GDP vs. increases in total outstanding debt (government + business + consumer) for the last 30 years. Minus debt, there have only been a few quarters of genuine GDP growth. 2008 should have been a wakeup call. We hit the "debt saturation point" and the economy crashed. There is simply no way to continue the 30 year borrowing party.
this is why I keep saying it: Libertarianism (as expressed by most individuals) is simply ignorance of history, of human society, which will inevitably recreate the same society and government it seeks to replace.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Libertarianism: where we read books on the nature and history of man, law, and society, and simply ignore the parts we don't like, secure int he belief that those parts weren't important. Where we also believe that Democracy is illegitimate because people disagree with me, therefore the solution isn't rational discourse or persuasion....but anarchy.
Libertarianism: a past failed experiment that Bat S Crazy people keep thinking just has to work the next time around.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
When clever accountants figured out that they can just make up inter-company fees in order to make it look like the company is making money in Ireland when all their actual customers live in the US. Seriously, the title of this thread is "Double Irish" - look it up.
Actually Singapore healthcare is among the most highly regulated in the world.
you are confusing insurance and care.
the insurance is a 3 tier system, with varying levels of public or private sources.
but the care is extremely regulated, including strict price controls.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Then please feel free to stop driving on my roads, going to my schools, enjoying the safety granted by my food inspectors and military and police.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Foaming at the mouth ideology, disconnected from any actual facts or reality. The US has a much more private healthcare system than pretty much all of Europe. We ARE the private health care system you fetishize. And it's horrible. The cost/benefit ration is way out of whack.
Yet all those European state run national healthcare systems are both cheaper than the US system (spending as much as 40% LESS per person) while providing better care.
That is reality.
That is facts.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Um...by definition "overtaxing" means you took in more money than you needed, ie, a surplus, which is the opposite of a deficit.
A deficit means you spent more than you took in, which means you undertaxed.
You cant even get your basic terminology and concepts right, and you expect us to believe you have something intelligent to say?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Almost all of the design and administration of Apple is done in California. But surprisingly the "Company" is a foreign company where they have no factories, no designers, no corporate officers and just a bank account.
So yes, by using the talent and ingenuity of US workers and then claiming that they're an Irish Company they are stealing the value that US Society has invested into its workforce (and supplied the infrastructure for that workforce to get to the job site etc).
Personally I believe that we should tax not based on where they are located but where most of the value is created. If you are Microsoft and 90% of your workforce is in Washington State but you are incorporate in "Nevada" because you have a PO Box there then you should be taxed at 90% Washington 8% California and 2% Nevada tax rates. Similarly if 80% of your operations are in the US then you are 80% a US company and 80% of your revenue is taxable under US tax law.
Everybody knows that Apple is a California company. To say otherwise is dishonesty. It might legally be correct that Apple is a subsidiary of an Irish shell corporation but they're cheating the system and doing something that doesn't pass any sort of sniff test of truthfulness.
Shouldn't overlook Ikea which is, after all, a not for profit company registered in the Netherlands.
http://www.economist.com/node/...
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
I don't disagree. If I had my way, we would be inching toward states' rights instead of away from it.
For instance, I'm a big supporter of the Article V amendment process; it circumvents Congress and they really can't do much about it. I feel that if a convention were to actually sit, the first and best amendment to be proposed would be regularly scheduled conventions for the purpose of providing a much-needed check on Washington.
We have the processes in place to help put us back on track, if only we would use them. Article V is a tough road, but lately it has been gaining momentum. We have options to break from our current path without armed revolution, and that's the point of democratic society.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
We don't need a corporate Berlin wall, we need to balance a toxic asymmetry: Jobs can be exported with very little economic friction while labor faces considerable friction when it attempts to follow those jobs.
If a country wants to export labor, export commodities or import jobs from the US market, they should balance this against labor imports, job exports and commodity imports. Taxes must provide just enough friction to correct any imbalance and compensate for the jobs sucked out of the US market. Is this unfair use of US hegemony? Maybe but US hegemony currently benefits only the 1% while the 99% suffer the resulting wars and economic ruin
While we're on the topic of hegemony, why do US corporations get a free ride at destroying our reputation overseas while ordinary American citizens who misbehave have their passports revoked? Since US corporations have the same legal rights and responsibilities as US citizens, corporations should be required to hold passports.
Corporations which do not behave responsibly should have their passports revoked and should not be allowed to operate overseas. Most of us can come up with examples of corporations which have committed acts of treason. These should not only have their passports revoked, they should face the possibility of execution.
We should double the proposed off-shoring tax to 28%. The US dollar has risen more than 28% against the Euro so even with a 28% off-shoring tax, the cost of operating the Irish facade would be the same as it was in 2008.
This would also be the perfect time to impose a 50% tax on oil. This too would be easily absorbed as oil priced have dropped by more than 50% since 2008. A higher oil tax would keep domestic oil and alternative energy industries alive and it would provide Americans with a buffer against future OPEC price volatility. It would also weaken OPEN and give us more control over oil prices.
Business taxes should be based on where the economic activity occurs, not where the business is registered.
Precisely. Most of Apple's business does not occur in Ireland (or the Cayman Islands, or wherever).
If (say) 50% of Apple's profits are made in the US, they should pay tax on that 50% of total profit in the US.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
One wonders if Obama is so petty that he is working doubly hard to make sure Shrillary looses. It sure seems that way. I think she would make a horrible President. Obama lies really well, Hillary not so much...
Murphy was an optimist
Where, pray tell, do you think the money for this "free education, healthcare, roads, police, and judicial services" actually comes from?
Murphy was an optimist
The tax issue is pretty complex and the idea that companies are 'hiding' profits or something is much more complex.
1. Most countries have a sales tax which captures the economic activity in their own country. I'm in Canada. For every IPhone sold, the government is going to get something like 10-15% of the sales price. Heck for a lot of low-margin business, the government gets more in sales tax than the company is going to make in profit for that sale
2. Most countries have taxes on wages. Apple employs thousands of people on its own dime. The government is then going to tax those people at anywhere from 20-50% depending on the country. To top it off, people employed by these companies don't get government assistance.
3. Money leaving the company to actual people in the form of capital gains, dividends... is also taxed again.
There is actually very little in the way of 'hiding' going on.
At every turn, the government gets to put it's hand in the jar so to speak. I'm not saying it is a bad thing,
But why is the corporate rate attractive to tax? I'd guess it is because the corporation is this abstract entity.
But its very interesting to see how different countries approach these things. The US has a number of really high profile companies and views that as things to be taxed to enrich America.
In say China, companies are backed by the state because they generate jobs and exports.
In Canada, we lack many such high profile companies and want to attract these companies, so we actually start lowering tax rates, giving incentives for companies to locate here, but fall short of actually backing them.
It's just interesting to see how things are viewed as either things to be taxed or things to be encouraged. Even something as simply as airports. In Canada, the government views airports as just another thing, so they have hefty leases and other things that airports have to pay. This results in airports, like Toronto Pearson having high fees that many people even choose to drive to Buffalo, NY, to take flights from there.
In the US, airports are viewed more as infrastructure, not revenue generators or to be revenue neutral; heck they're often subsidized.
It really is a matter of perspective. ....
But like all things, increase costs too much on anything relative to other countries, and people will find a way to avoid it.
Increase sales tax too much, and people will drive to the next country over with lower sales tax.
Make life hard for corporations... don't worry... you're corporations aren't that special in the world. Apple is nice, but it's not like Samsung isn't producing many phones.
Never mind that taxes at an 80 year low. When taxes were 90% after WW2, many corporations plowed that money back into the business to avoid giving it to Uncle Sam. With low inflation and low interest rates, many corporations are content to hoard cash and let it sit idle.
Speak for yourself.
I want services, and I'm willing to pay... for those services that I want.
I don't want to pay for stuff I have no use for. If you want to pay for those things, because you think you have a use for them, or because it warms the cockles of your heart to provide those things to other people, feel free to do so. But you don't have a right to make that decision for anyone else but yourself.
Now you can do that by having each person pay an "individually crafted" tax bill, but that's silly.
You can do that by moving everything into either subscription services (like a number of fire departments have done), or tolls (for using the roads).
I prefer the latter myself, but am open to the former if you can come up with a way to make it work.
Since the GOP wants to unbalance the budget anyway, to "shrink" government, and won't raise taxes for what the government is *supposed* to be doing, why not do it right, and make it a permanent tax. Certainly, we've needed massive infrastructure work since St. Ronnie - a report from engineers, back in the '80's, said half our bridges and dams needed work, and damn little's been done since - and this would help, as well as giving people steady, decent incomes (which helps both government revenue in taxes, and the rest of the economy).
But the unenlightened self-interested libertarians here will freak out....
mark
You're a hypocrite because you enjoy the benefits of society, but insist that you owe it nothing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
My mistake. You're a fantasist.
Well, so long as you keep paying your taxes, you're free to your own private absurd religious beliefs.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ah, another freeman on the land nutter.
The Founding Fathers didn't write about speed limits or concrete sidewalks either. The Constitution's intent was to create a basic legal framework, not to envision every possible tax. Income taxes have long been ruled lawful, so pay them, hypocrite.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I agree completely. It is just the way things are. If you remove government, you get highway bandits. Eventually, the highway bandits compete with each other, until one wins. The dominant winner doesn't hide. He and his group conspicuously controls the highways, to keep all the other highway bandits out. They wear uniforms. They streamline their collection. They create euphamisms, like "tolls", and "North Texas Transportation Authority" for their operations. We ultimately accept them, because they are us... I could personalize it like this: The people got rid of the government. Then, when I was bringing my butternut squash that I grew on my land to market, someone set up a roadblock and took most of it, claiming they were collecting tolls (for whatever). I need to take my squash back, or steal someone else's food to survive. I find it is not so easy acting alone, so I get a posse together. We take all of our stuff back. But then some other groups try to take back the stuff we reposessed. You can see where this is going. As long as I fail to kill all the toll takers who cross my path, I am literally paying people to be highway bandits. I am the highway bandit. I am the government. Or alternatively, I am a true libertarian, killing all the toll takers (and police who come after me) who crazily believe they are doing their job and earning a living. Really, those dead people were just immoral highway bandits, trying to steal my goods at gunpoint. I am not the troll. They are (or were).
Join the IParty!
Seriously, at this point, Obama is one of the most business unfriendly presidents this country has seen. He can't get out of this office fast enough.
For every percent of taxes not repatriated, we send one drone after their top execs and top shareholders, starting at the top and working down.
I give it about one week before they pay in full.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
He's proposing taking money *earned* in other countries for the benefit of the US economy. The US is not the only country getting foxed by the Irish solution. (for instance, Australia has the same problems with it)
The error in your analysis is the assumption that there necessarily needs to be a single, centralized authority. That approach is characteristic of progressive, fascist, socialist, and communist states, mostly in the West, but it is hardly an essential part of government. Most societies historically have functioned perfectly well without it.
Yes: into a false dichotomy.
States rights are certainly a good thing, as is restoration of the interstate commerce clause to its original purpose (unimpeded trade between the states), as is subsidiarity even below the state level.
I really can't think of much that I would want to amend the Constitution by. As written, it gives only a small and reasonable number of enumerated powers to the federal government. The problem we are having is that the federal government is simply ignoring the limits set by the US Constitution; how is amending the Constitution going to fix that?
And why at all would you presume that I am 'trolling'? What, everybody who sees government as the ultimate oppressive evil force that only exists to destroy individual freedoms is a 'troll'? Interesting. It is essential liberty that has been denied generations of individuals not having their earnings stolen from them via taxes. There is such a thing as voluntary exchange, you are incapable of even slight understanding that is enough for a human society to work together, there is no need for coercive group violence, it is destructive and it starts at the very beginning, promoted by parents hitting their fucking kids.
You can't handle the truth.
No shit Sherlock. Why do you think I said they wouldn't vote for Obama, or any Democrat toeing his line?
Either you're a raving dammfool lunatic right wing nutjob, or you're just a raving dammfool lunatic nutjob. There's insufficient evidence to decide between them.
> hoard cash and let it sit idle
Does it make any sense to do that? Here's a theoretical question. Take a person who works hard to earn what it takes to live. Some savings for retirement and deferred spending make sense, but if that person has earned enough to live while not earning, why bother continuing to go to work (never mind those who would go nuts doing nothing)?
A person with dreams might save big time in order to some day be able to realize something bigger. But all these companies hoarding cash seem to have no outlet to try anything with their money. So it's time to ask, are there no more challenges? Or are the challenges so daunting that the risk-reward ratio is too much? Well, maybe it's just a timing issue after all, as there are plenty of ventures that show promise and companies get purchased all the time.
Nevertheless, the large cash hoards will prompt governments to prod these companies to do something. The US looks to be the one to start the pebble rolling down the hill. The companies have been put on notice to start spending.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
We Have Petitioned President Obama To Impose Tax On Corporate Revenues, Not Profits;
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
Casteism
I pay for everything I enjoy and I like paying for things I enjoy, that's the only thing I need from society - to be able to buy things I enjoy. What I hate about the so called society is you, people like you, who want to use violence as a group against individuals, because people like you want to steal and use group violence to achieve it.
Is that clear enough for you?
You can't handle the truth.
Wrong, free market means market without external regulations that are not intrinsic emerging properties of the market itself and governments are an imposition, a violent group put together to interfere with the intrinsic emerging properties of the market.
Free market is market free from government rules, nothing else at all.
I do not watch USA television regardless of what you believe I do not watch Fox and regardless of what many here assume I didn't read Atlas Shrugged until literally a year ago out of curiosity and though I found it to be a beautiful work of philosophy and art, my views have formed over almost 3 decades prior based on my own understanding of the world we live in here.
So if you want to attack my views, attack my views, but do not assume things that I did not specifically mention or refer to.
You can't handle the truth.
In a market free from government intrusion people do make money (and we know they do, we have this happening today) by providing expert opinion and they stake their own brand name on it.
You can't handle the truth.
Then others provide inexpert opinion under the same brand , spoiling the brand.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Somehow I am quite certain that in the age of instant communications and the Internet this is not an insurmountable issue for free market participants.
On the other hand I have less than 0 trust in anything (anything) that comes out of government. Less than 0 specifically because I expect it to be propaganda based and to be against my self interest and against the interests of society at large and in the interests of some better connected entities who have monopoly access to government officials.
You can't handle the truth.
I really can't think of much that I would want to amend the Constitution by.
I can. If Congress passes some unpopular law, and the Supreme Court asserts that the law is constitutional, then the states can pass an amendment nullifying the law as well as future variants. There isn't a thing Congress can do about it since they don't have the authority to subvert this process, meaning there would finally be a viable check from the states on Washington.
And if the convention passes an amendment requiring a convention of the states every 2 years (or on whatever time table is deemed best), such laws will be reviewed by the convention on a regular basis.
Even if Congress attempts to subvert this process as you suggest, that would give the states more ammunition to take back to the people and demand that those currently in power at the federal level be removed from office.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
"perfectly well". That literally made me laugh out loud. So perfect!!! Yes, if you zoom out far enough, and look at the world as a whole, the world society lacks a single centralized authority. And world society, historically speaking, functions "perfectly well" with instability, wars, famine, injustice, rape, murder, apathy, ignorance, environmental destruction, and all the rest. That is just what people do, on a macro scale, and a micro scale. They need these things to evolve! The error in *your* thinking is that there is or ever has been any central authority anywhere. There have always been competing authorities, and competing rules, and competing systems, with borders and limitations. And evolution. And evolutionary blind alleys. Mutation, cancer, and disease (because there is no central progressive, socialist, communist, facist authority for DNA reproduction, and life functions perfectly well without it). Beheadings. Warlords. Conquest. Palaces and dungeons. Yes, as you say, "Most societies historically have functioned perfectly well without it." The earth continues to spin, and life continues to evolve into ever greater forms. Nice to see someone else thinking perfectly well for a change. Throw away your labels and ideals, and let us stand on the bones of our ancestors and have a perfectly good laugh! Or should we try to kill each other to decide who is right and who's children will laugh over our bones?
Join the IParty!
Yeah, yeah, of-course you are attacking me, not my ideas but me personally. Attacking a person rather than his ideas, fine, that's the modus operandi with most incompetents as I already quoted Asimov. You think you can disguise a personal attack rather than an attack on an idea with your 'concern' for me, whatever.
You can't handle the truth.
Your certainty and personal trust have less than zero importance in a supposedly logical discussion. Did you mean it to be a blind faith based discussion from the start?
With internet, the problem of authentic information has increased, not decreased.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Taxes are at an 80 year low. No need to surrender the honey jar as well.
You are in wesley snipes territory man. He really believed cockeyed things too.
It's like people who torrent things who think they arent' doing anything illegal so they get reckless or that guy you read about who offers pot to a cop in a state where it's illegal because he's lost touch with the fact it is illegal.
anyway-- moving on from this thread. Best of luck.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"But all these companies hoarding cash seem to have no outlet to try anything with their money."
It's surprising the shareholders aren't agitating for dividends - they can't be paid out until the company repatriates the cash and pays tax first.
What are they counterfeiting, exactly speaking?
If government military is an outdated idea, what's stopping you from living the way you want right now? Simply use whatever method you had in mind to deal with hostile foreign governments to free yourself from the US government.
Besides this, simply claiming something "shouldn't" be the domain of government is not a convincing argument. Why should roads, healthcare, communications, etc. have nothing to do with government? How would they be dealt with, and why would that be a superior way?
So, in your view, firefighters are not pulling their weight but mafia accountants are?
Again, assertions require backing to be convincing.
What do you mean by "real productivity"? Is there some kind of "false productivity" it contrasts with? How do you reconcile your claim with your own earlier assertion that "Roads, education, health care, communications, etc., none of it should have anything to do with government in the first place" which kinda implies that currently, government is doing all of these things?
Schools, hospitals, firefighters, police, roads, telecommunications... How do you propose paying for these without taxes? Sucks for you if your parents can't afford to send you to a private school?
I'm going to assume you meant "voluntary". So, how do you propose to ensure a group of thugs with guns doesn't move in as soon as the police move out? Because this far you're doing a pretty poor job of convincing even people actually willing to talk about the issue, which most groups of thugs with guns probably aren't.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how your idea is even remotely workable. Subscription for fire services would lead to firemen standing around letting your house burn over an unpaid subscription (as it has already happened), and you would also be left open to blackmail from those who know who paid the subscription and who didn't. Also, if your neighbor is irresponsible and does not pay, and his house catches fire, your house might catch fire as well. The firemen will either wait until your house lights up and then get to work, so you still get some water damage, or extinguish the fire anyway in order to remove the danger for you and the rest of the neighborhood. Great, you and everybody else just paid to save the house of your lousy neighbor.
All roads becoming toll roads is also a terrible idea. This is a natural monopoly, because it is not viable to have at least two roads to every destination. Think the cable subscription is bad? You can at least give up cable. What if you can't get to work because the road toll has just increased a third time this year. Or if you are in an emergency and you can't afford to pay the toll for the road to the hospital. Toll highways have a place, because usually there is at least one other alternative and you can do a cost-benefit analysis before deciding if you will pay the toll or take the other route. But tolls on every road is just begging to be abused.
A la carte tax is not an option, because a lot of things would just not get paid for. For example the army - guess how many people would take exception to paying for that, and it is not a small percentage in your tax total. Even most of the vocal supporters would just take the opportunity to keep more money for themselves.
So yes, you and I and everybody must pay for a lot of things that we find absurd and completely unjustifiable, because the alternative to that is much worse.
Re: Fire Departments
What happens today in the scenario you describe (where the neighbor's house is on fire) is that the subscription fire department comes out and provides preventative protection to your building so that it doesn't catch on fire in the first place.
Re: Roads
If you don't like the tolls on the roads you have to drive to get to work, maybe you need to move somewhere else. I live in a part of teh country where it's not uncommon for someone to own a house at the end of four to five miles of road where theirs is the only house on the road, at the far end. Why should everyone else be paying for upkeep on that road, subsidizing their choice to live in the middle of nowhere?
Re: A la carte tax and the military
Are you kidding? It'd be a GOOD thing if our military was pared down due to lack of general support for it. Here's the thing about Americans: When there is a genuine need to step up and take action, we are willing - nay, proud - to do so. But that happens ever so rarely (WWI, WWII), compared to the multitude of times where we decide to be Team America World Police, mostly because someone has to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars that got spent on this weapon system or that carrier group. Let the people who want to protect Kuwaiti oil pay to do so. Let the people who want to oust Saddam do so. And if those people aren't able to raise enough money to do so, then it's a "vote with your pocketbook" way of demonstrating that there isn't enough popular support for those deployments in the first place.
The idea that I tried to convey is that preventative protection would still damage your property.
Also, the problem with roads is the fact that they are a monopoly, and as such the prices would become unreasonable, sooner or later, everywhere.
And the vote with your pocketbook does not really work also because people are naturally reluctant to give up any cash that they feel they don't absolutely have to, especially for something as remote as national defense. The might of the American army would become history in a flash, and like it or not a lot of what makes America great comes from the fact that it is the greatest military power in the entire history. The effects would not become visible only overseas, but back home and very nasty and very soon. Like any great enterprise, the army can not be simply wound down. The conservation costs alone for all the equipment are staggering. If you would cut the funding tomorrow in half, the entire thing would just implode.
Social Security and Medicare costs are only going to get worse as our population ages. And those costs are what is really tanking the federal budget.
You are wrong. Social Security and Medicare were already paid for. Read that again please: The people who are pulling from Social Security and Medicare ALREADY PAID FOR IT.
Do you understand that? Saying that Social Security and Medicare is a drain on the budget is a lie.
No, what happened is that around 1980, the federal government passed a law that allowed them to trade government bonds for the cash that was on-hand at Social Security Administration.
What you are seeing now is that the government spent all of that money on domestic spying and other police state activities and are trying to frame the budget shortfall as a Social Security problem.
The bonds are due and have to be paid. This is not a Social Security problem at all. Social Security has enough of these bonds to pay for everything. The problem is that the government DOES NOT WANT TO PAY THESE BONDS... so they frame it as a Social Security shortfall rather than what it truly is: Theft from a paid-for program to fund an unconstitutional attack on American citizens.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Of course, you are correct, but you do not negate what he said.
Fair share implies that the taxes they will have to pay are fair.
Just drop the word fair and the sentence becomes fine: They should pay their share.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
As someone in the middle class, I can tell you I do not get nearly the number of services I pay for.
Toll roads is absolutely a great idea. It does not need to be a privately owned road. With camera system based toll collection there is no need to have expensive toll plazas and you do not need to impede traffic to collect.
Government ownership of the road system is still a good idea but tolls should be used to collect maintenance revenue as it is the only way to accurately charge people for use and it balances with the need for maintenance.
I want services, and I'm willing to pay... for those services that I want.
I actually have a suggestion for this, but people tend not to like it.
I think that when you file your taxes, you should be able to fill out a form saying where the money goes. So you can pick whatever services you like and send money to them. This can be the fire department, roads, etc. If you fill out the form online, you can drill down to a relatively low level (e.g. replacing the stop sign at the end of your street with a traffic light). If there's not enough money for your pet project, then the money is invested in treasury bonds until there is enough money (or it passes the statutory period and goes to cancel the national debt).
So Mitt Romney can dedicate all his taxes to the military (because he thinks the military is underfunded). Barack Obama can send his money to international welfare (foreign aid). Hilary Clinton can give hers to domestic welfare. Tom Steyer can send his to the EPA.
This would reunite responsibility and ownership. I wouldn't be paying my taxes for stupid things that I don't like. I may pay them to something that you don't like, but who cares? You can pay your taxes to something that I don't like.
A side effect of this is that we'd balance the budget. Programs would only get money if they could get funding. And people could no longer complain about how idiot politicians spend our money. We could only complain about how other people spend their money, because we'd each be spending our own.
While I am philosophically opposed to taxation in general, yours is a proposal I could live with as an "interim" measure... once people are used to directly contributing in this fashion, it's a natural next step to simply removing the form and letting people buy/fund things directly.