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?
