[lemming]

One thing to bear in mind is that for these really big companies, the huge attraction of Ireland is not the low corporate tax rate, it's that profits can be easily and legally sent to Holland, from where they can be sent to the Caribbean. I've seen similar stories from Google and Ikea, I believe they both pay low single digit tax rates on their non-US income due to this arrangement; in Ikea's case this is nearly all of it. It's really difficult to compete with that.

[forrestthewoods]

To me that implies that our current tax methodology is fundamentally wrong. In a global system with value placed on intellectual property and virtual goods, rather than manufactured products, the current tax design seems irreparably broken.

I don't know nearly enough about taxes or economics to propose a solution. Would a VAT tax at a lower rate be more consistent than a higher corporate income tax that may or may not be avoided depending on the corporation? Europeans seem to hate the VAT tax but I'm not sure if that stems from a high tax rate or the concept of the tax itself.

[toyg]

Jeebus Chrysler, VAT is the most regressive tax ever invented, please do not even mention it as a solution to anything. It's a flat (!) tax on non-avoidable consumption that is fundamentally unrelated to real wealth; it doesn't touch capital activity or in-activity, which means that rich people (whose wealth is sheltered as business capital on paper) simply don't pay it. It was a terrible gimmick invented by European governments to raise taxes on low-income individuals without telling them.

I hate to say this, but the only solution I can see to rise of worldwide corporations is... worldwide government, exactly like the answer to the rise of "national companies" in the XIX century was the creation of national governments of similar size. We can discuss about implementation details (the current arrangements -- going through WTO, WMF, UN etc -- are ineffective, opaque and/or fundamentally corrupt), but I don't see how else we could ever get out of this mess.