Google is a great company, but they’ve robbed us of more than a billion dollars a year over the last three years.
Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.
Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.
“It’s remarkable that Google’s effective rate is that low,” said Martin A. Sullivan, a tax economist who formerly worked for the U.S. Treasury Department. “We know this company operates throughout the world mostly in high-tax countries where the average corporate rate is well over 20 percent.”
The U.S. corporate income-tax rate is 35 percent. In the U.K., Google’s second-biggest market by revenue, it’s 28 percent.
That’s $3.1 billion dollars we don’t have to pay interest on our debt, or to balance the budget, or that we have to make up for with our own personal taxes. This is one of the things that irks me about people who complain about their income tax rates. Even if you think the government should do less and spend less, what about people and corporations exploiting loopholes that are unavailable to the common people, who then us leave footing the bill?
Ahhhh, but you forget the conservative mantra that the corporations will use all this kind of extra money to generate more jobs for we “common people”.
So it’s really for our own good that we allow them to have all this undeserved money. It’s the rich corporations, not the government, who will rescue us. Just look at how the banks have freed up all that credit for the “common people” with that “free money” they received.
If there’s one company that deserves tax breaks, it’s Google. Their employees are treated like kings. However, that’s just a ridiculous tax avoidance. 2.4% effective rate? Lol.
I’m actually for a lower corporate tax rate, but I want to make the one we already have more effective before lowering it. We might have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, but it’s not effective at all. It’s basically meaningless, as many corporations have paid 0%, let alone 2.4%.
Google is a profitable and efficient company but I think they are becoming too powerful as illustrated recently when they announced that they were teaming up with Verizon to control the flow of information through a tiered cost structure. At this time they may not be able to accomplish this goal but, at some point, they will be able to because their enemies (in congress and anywhere else with an internet connection) will be controlled by their very real ability to cause destruction with information and massive amounts of money to “invest” in Republicans. They are sitting in the cat bird seat going forward and may be tempted to abuse the power.
Given the fact that corporations give unlimited control to the money people to hide the money, how much of that money have the money people stolen?
If they will steal for you, they will steal from you.
That is an excellent point. And should be publicized about tax avoiders and their enablers.
I think the head/lead here and at Bloomberg misses the real story:
Google may be the most newsy focus, but its maneuvering is no different in kind than the tax-avoidance routinely practiced by pretty much every corporation. The article says the US loses about $60 billion in corporate taxes a year through this particular scam alone. And you know it’s by no means the only one going on — not by a longshot. So we come back to the same old question: how do you fix the broken system when it’s owned by the cheaters?
As to the issue of taxes in general and the blatant hypocrisy behind the Rovian bullshit, another point is the article is of interest:
Corporate entitlements start businesses and permanently subsidize many of them, like the oilcos, agribiz, and much of tech. The least these recipients could do is quit the whining about the horror of having to pay taxes. We need radical tax reform now, but who’s going to bite the hand that feeds them?
Why again do we have these tax havens in the Caribbean or whereeever?