Shouldn’t Giant Corporations Pay Taxes They Owe?

[xchrom]

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/08-4



A huge, huge giveaway of tax money to giant corporations is rolling down the tracks at us. If it happens, this tax giveaway would be second only to the bank bailouts on the list of schemes to give money to private corporations. (Except, with the bailouts we got some of that money back.)

Giant, multinational companies owe us up to $700 billion in taxes they have been avoiding paying. Now they say they’ll let us have some of the tax money they owe us if we let them off from paying it all. For some reason, just telling them to pay their taxes is off the table.

How The Scam Works

Here’s how this particular tax-avoidance scam works. Companies that make profits outside of the U.S. owe taxes on that money the same way they owe taxes on money made here. But a loophole lets them avoid, or “defer,” paying those taxes until they “bring the profits back into the U.S.,” also known as “repatriating” the profits.

The idea behind letting them defer taxes is that the companies might need to invest in things outside the U.S. that make them even more money later. This is a win-win for all of us because American companies making more is better for us and means even more tax revenue later.

[msongs]

1. since the primary purpose of our military is to protect corporations, I say yes nt

[daleanime]

2. K&R....

[DJ13]

3. letting them defer taxes is that the companies might need to invest in things outside the U.S.

That just gives them incentive to build more manufacturing outside the country.

[Igel]

4. People shouldn't make up their own definitions.

And then change them mid-stream.

The corporations don't owe the taxes until they repatriate the money. Then they owe taxes. It's not tax evasion--not paying what you owe. It's tax avoidance--using every part of the law you can to avoid paying taxes that you don't owe.

I'm personally big into tax avoidance. I claimed everything I was entitled to as a deduction. Some were credits against taxes. Some were deductions from income.

Sadly, we messed up. A relative used a freelance account to make $10k. The account was under one of our SSNs, so we're liable for the self-employment and income taxes.

If we'd issued the right 1099 we could have saved ourselves $2500--she'd have been counted as a kind of contract employee and would have had to pay taxes at a lower income tax rate. If we had offered to pay her share of the taxes we'd have saved over $500. We payed more than we needed to. I messed up on tax avoidance.

Unless, of course, the rule is that taking advance of legal "loopholes" like child tax credit and such, failing to pay as much as I could possibly owe, is failing to pay what I owe. Then a lot of people I know fail to pay what they "owe."

I assume you and the writer didn't engage in nefarious tax avoidance to fail to pay what you "owe" by doing things like claiming personal deductions or tax credits.

[oldhippie]

5. That would make things pretty dull around here

As you may have noticed, in any discussion of economics or taxes, many here will use their own definitions of things like avoid/evade, profit, loophole, and any number of other terms. We will also re-frame accepted definitions to suit our own arguments. How could we have these long threads about taxes that go on for hundreds of posts if we didn't constantly mangle commonly accepted accounting terms to make our points?