[pc86]

It's only "quite gross" if you have a... gross misunderstanding of how taxes work. They're not paying zero taxes on profit, they haven't profited yet except on arbitrary time scales. Here's a... gross oversimplification:

Year 1: Lose $50 million. Total profit: -$50 million. $0 taxes paid.

Year 2: Lose $10 million. Total profit: -$60 million. $0 taxes paid.

Year 3: Make $35 million. Total profit: -$25 million. $0 taxes paid. People who are either uninformed or petulant ideologues scream about you not paying taxes on $35 million in profit.

[rev_d]

The big thing with the multinationals is that they're able to pull stunts like corporate inversions & royalty payments to their foreign entity to reduce their profit under the (more heavily taxed) US entity.

Then you have measures intended to rein them in like GILTI & Transition Tax, which end up mostly affecting smaller businesses.