| > most people agree that these companies are not paying the amount of taxes they should They will say this because the news tells them this is true. But it seems far from obvious to me. If a multinational sets up shop in France, then a whole pile of taxes do get paid: VAT is 20% of all sales. Then there is income tax / social security / etc. I don't know any French details, but I'm quite sure it's above 30% in total... all of which you should think of as being collected on the transaction that A pays Mr. B. If the company spends most of their revenue on salaries, then this already sounds like order of 50% of throughput goes to tax. In addition to this, they may make some profit. And it seems pretty hard to know where the profit was made. How much is iOS worth? Or the Starbucks logo... quite a bit, your groggy airport customers know what they're getting, but there's no really obvious way to put a unique number on this. And thus it's honestly difficult to say where the profit was made. Yet this is often the whole violent argument! Over maybe 20% of say 5% profit, 1% of sales... 1/50th of the taxes already collected above. If they wished to collect more, they could easily tweak those numbers. I'd go so far as to suggest that we should just give up, set the tax on corporate profits to zero globally... but at least they are generally moving down. > Our society has never been so rich, yet we see decline in education, health, etc But we collect more tax than ever. It it buys us worse healthcare, or education, than it did in the past, then the problem may lie elsewhere. |
You have to remember that VAT, payroll, and income taxes roughly scale with revenue, but corporate taxes scale with profits.