Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

Who cares they earned that money through hard work and government welfare! Oh wait... These pricks take billions in government subsidies, pay Americans # wages and you guys think it's ok?

Time wake up or shut up in my opinion and take a back seat while the rest of us start doing something about this.

www.icij.org...

Pepsi, IKEA, AIG, Coach, Deutsche Bank, Abbott Laboratories and nearly 340 other companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg that allowed many of them to slash their global tax bills.

So free market, supply and demand, low wage earners deserve the slave life while paying taxes and earning billions and billions of dollars for these companies.

Let me break it down for you.

They pay crap wages, those wages are taxes. Then those wages are used to buy goods from these same companies which are taxes again. Then the tax money is given back to these companies in he form of subsidies and what do they do?

They find tax loopholes and hide billions of not trillions of dollars offshore where we can't touch it.

If you can't see the problem here you gotta just go back to your desk job forget about it...

a reply to: onequestion

Look at it this way. If they paid their taxes, the government would triple or quadruple those taxes in debt borrowed to bribe some other country.

Now, feel better. Hmmm, I don't either.

a reply to: liveandlearn

I don't believe that taxing them solves anything. Taxes = bigger government and more subsidies.

We gotta solve one problem at a time and these mega corps need to start contributing to society. I'm more pro paying their employees than I am paying higher taxes. They shouldn't be getting subsidies if they are raking in these profits.

That money cools go to towards making college easier.

a reply to: onequestion

Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

A pertinent issue here is how much tax business actually expects they should have to pay. The real question in all this is that somebody should the ask business community is "what tax rate would they be happy to pay and keep paying into the future?"

When I went out to work in 1968 the corporate tax in my country was 60%. A major business magazine at about that time published an article on the purpose of having foreign business operate in this country and the reason was because of the amount of tax they pay. Today they are sill here and paying 50% less tax.

Today the corporate tax rate here is 30% and falling. When will business be happy to pay x tax rate?

Will we someday see a situation where the corporate tax rate is zero %?

Will they still not happy with that and demand that they get paid bonus dollars for every dollar of profit they make?

Will we see some year after that, see them demand a doubling of the bonus dollars they get?

Someone needs to tell these people that if they have no plans to contribute to the nations tax bill then they can pack up and pharc off.

a reply to: Azureblue
I think were going to see a situation where the corporation becomes the state.

originally posted by: onequestion
a reply to: Azureblue
I think were going to see a situation where the corporation becomes the state.

If you consider how congress and the senate are run, we're pretty much there already.

originally posted by: onequestion
a reply to: Azureblue
I think were going to see a situation where the corporation becomes the state.

Sadly I agree.

When the transpacific partnership is in place that will be the first instance of corporations becoming the government.

Why?

Because no national govt who signs the agreement will even think of passing any legislation until they have run it past the major corporations first to get there OK (permission) to go ahead with the legislation.

This is because under deal if a company thinks they have been disadvantaged by the law, they can sue the govt through their own private court, the members of which they appoint if not formally then certainly, informally.

Once this sort of thing is place, it wont take long to expand this power into other countries with or without such a treaty. Nor will it take long before no political party will change their leadership or announce policy shifts without firt getting the say so of the major corporations first.

and so on and so on.

just a week so ago there was a post on this forum about a project that has been in train since 1997 to have shared govt with major stakeholder (business) participation.

originally posted by: onequestion
a reply to: liveandlearn

I don't believe that taxing them solves anything. Taxes = bigger government and more subsidies.

We gotta solve one problem at a time and these mega corps need to start contributing to society. I'm more pro paying their employees than I am paying higher taxes. They shouldn't be getting subsidies if they are raking in these profits.

That money cools go to towards making college easier.

Corporate taxes are irrelevant, and by extension so are corporate tax rates. If they pay a tax it's reflected in the cost of the product, therefore the person who is really paying the tax is the consumer. If on the other hand, there are no corporate taxes there need to be higher individual taxes to get that money out of a persons income. Whether it's a 0% or 35% tax rate, the consumer is the one who pays it.

There is a brilliant paper on how a small group amongst big corporations own the majority of the wealth.
Basically within the top 500 corporations own shares of each others business, the ownership is all intertwined. Although this ownership is vast there appears to be a small group amongst these that own the majority of shares and wealth of the whole network. Therefore having more control and influence over the whole network.

I can't remember the paper but her is an article discussing it.

link

originally posted by: InMyShell
Basically within the top 500 corporations own shares of each others business, the ownership is all intertwined.

The majority of shares for the Fortune 500 are institutionally held.

a reply to: Aazadan

Then why are we subsidizing them?

originally posted by: onequestion
a reply to: Aazadan

Then why are we subsidizing them?

Because of international markets. It's a competitive advantage for a multinational to base in a low tax country while selling their product to nations that have a high tax rate.

I actually support a 0% corporate tax rate, but it's not a big issue for me. The problem is that it's somewhat illogical because 0% isn't the minimum. The moment a couple nations start offering a 0% rate some nation is going to offer a -1% rate, then a -2% rate, and so on. Some of our major corporations in the US already have effective negative rates. It's essentially an unwinnable race to the bottom. Instead we should just pick a rate that most people are content with and leave it alone.

Multinationals aren't going to ignore the US (until we become a third world nation that is), and that's all it's about. The rate itself is pretty much irrelevant.

a reply to: Aazadan

So no taxes and they also collect subsidies while paying their employees such a low wage that their employees have to collect subsidies as well.

Time to end that paradigm.

The corporate structure is not beneficial to society as a whole....never was....

originally posted by: bandersnatch
The corporate structure is not beneficial to society as a whole....never was....

I'm not so sure about that. Corporations have been very beneficial to society, but just as there are good and bad people there are good and bad corporations. Laws are supposed to prevent some of the things bad corporations do, just as laws let us take action against bad people.

Big corporations are destroying the very fabric of our society. This includes Google, FB, and other Silicon Valley cartel unicorn creations.

a reply to: Aazadan

Bloated oversized and corrupt corporations who pay dirt wages are bad.

At least we can agree on that.