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by sambeau
954 days ago
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Global corporations aren't generally looking for the lowest tax rates to house their companies, they are looking for the ways to avoid paying taxes in a higher tax country by offsetting them in tax havens. They do this by splitting themselves into multiple shell companies, then play dodgy games of selling things to themselves at stupid prices: charge one subsidiary a few dollars for a missile and another $50k for a roll of toilet paper. This practice should be illegal as it's basically tax evasion and fraud. But, our politicians are corrupt cowards, so we all have to pretend it's just good housekeeping and lump it. All the megacorps would be fantastically successful without playing these stupid games (most of them did their greatest growth spurts before they started doing it), and our countries would be so much nicer places to live if we only agreed that paying back to the society that nurtured you was an important part of the social contract. Tax is civilisation. By pushing back against it like this you are essentially pushing back against civilisation, and the effects of this are all around us in our crumbling infrastructure, failing health, and desperate tent cities. |
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I was under the impression that the vast majority of it was via collecting "royalties" for the branding? Ie: a company's trademarked brands are owned by a holding company HQ'd in a tax shelter, and the parent company pays a licensing fee that just so happens to equal most if not all of their profits for the year.
It seems like it'd be pretty trivial to target via a tax on payments for intellectual property royalties to offshore corporations or a law that deems it tax evasion to pay IP royalties to a holding company outside the US for a corporation that is primarily operating in the US and Canada.