People seem to be ignoring the needs of vampires, locusts and cannibals!
For God’s sake, think of the vampires, locusts and cannibals!
This only follows the corporations being openly greedy. But hey, that’s them just doing their job, right? So it’s A-OK!
Ahh, I misunderstood. We aren’t debating politics, we are playing a quick game of Bump Our Postcount With Contentless One Liners.
I can play too.
You don’t get it![/quote]
Au contraire, you are a mere corporate shill, beholden to your corpulent masssstersss. I speet in your direction![/quote]
Bah, liberal hippy! Put down the pipe, get a haircut, get a job, and get off welfare![/quote]
YOU call it welfare - I call it “tenure.” :wink:
In fairness duder, you didn’t do much explainin’.
Not true. Income generated in the US by a non-resident non-citizen is taxed. For instance, invesments in American stock by a foreigner who lives in his native country. Just FYI.
Now back to the original post, and to quell some of the malarkey, let’s do some math. Let us say that US Company, Inc. makes X dollars per year. They hide… uh sorry “invest”… Y of it overseas to avoid paying taxes. Therefore they are paying 35% of (X-Y) now, or 0.35*(X-Y). Let us assume this plan goes into affect and our US Company, Inc brings all the money back here at the new rate of 5%, thus 0.05*(X). If we set these to be equal, and solve for Y, we see that a company would need to be hiding something crazy like 85% of their income overseas for the taxes paid to be equal.
shift, what are you talking about?
The issue here isn’t creative accounting or hiding income overseas. This is really about profits made in foreign countries by manufacturing products in foreign countries and selling the to foreign people to make a foreign revenue stream which offsets foreign expenses. And most likely foreign taxes were paid on the foreign profits in the foreign country. At the end of all that, why should a company owe the U.S. govt a nickel?
This isn’t about incoming hiding or creative accounting to move money overseas, this is about encouraging companies to take the profits from their foreign subsidiaries and invest them in the U.S. instead of in foreign countries.
What’s the rest of the first world’s tax policy of foreign profits?
How much is France withholding from your paycheck?
The article read like the companies were keeping profits overseas explicitly to avoid domestic taxes.
The paragraph that said this to me was: “The nation’s corporate tax rules - combined with spotty enforcement by an underfunded and outmuscled Internal Revenue Service - provide strong incentives for American companies to shift their profits from the United States to low-tax havens, such as Ireland and Luxembourg. Once there, the profits are allowed to grow untaxed by the United States until they are repatriated. That tax deferral is a hugely munificent gesture - as if the country’s biggest businesses had been granted their own special I.R.A.'s.”
I don’t see anything about these being foreign profits on foreign goods made by foreign workers of foreign subsidiaries sold in foreign markets to foreign people, etc.etc. At most the article calls them “foreign profits”. Of course it also says (above): “…to shift their profits from the United States to low-tax havens…” So I guess it’s a journalistic wash.
In any event these tax rules rules are created by the government for American companies to follow. Thus, they are explicitly using this ability (“loophole”) as a way to avoid paying taxes on those profits. If you want to be an American company you ought to play by the rules.
</idealistic naivete>
Obviously corporations don’t want to be american, they want to be profitable.
Globalization can be a bitch sometimes. :)
How much is France withholding from your paycheck?[/quote]
Err, I’m not paid in capital gains.
shift6- Tim Partlett is an Englishman working in Germany. Even if he is employed by me, the US government gets none of his paycheck.
From the quoted portion, the government would rather have 5% of something than 35% of nothing.
True. And I admit I ran off-topic to Englishman Tim in Germany investing in an American company, not working for it. So my bad on that.