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Comment by joelrunyon | Hacker News Reader

The problem is with the laws. Poorly written, lazy or "bought-for" laws are being used exactly as they are worded. If you want better laws, you need to write better laws - not just hope that people will follow what each law intended.

For the people that claim that the tax loopholes are something that the companies lobby for - again - it's interesting that people are upset with the companies who lobby for this, rather than the fact that politicians are receiving the actual money.

The problem is not with the companies - it's with the politicians that allow money to influence themselves. It's laughable to me that politicians denounce "money in politics" with one hand and are busy recruiting, fundraising and accepting it on the other.

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I agree it's pointless to blame companies. But it's also intellectually lazy to blame the tax code. What "paid for" "loopholes" are you talking about? Because tech company tax avoidance is based on taking advantage of straightforward principles of tax law. The double Irish, for example, takes advantage of the difference between the US view of corporate residency (country of incorporation) and the Irish view (country of control), along with the deductibility of licensing expenses. These aren't obscure loopholes written into tax codes by paid-for legislators. You can't have a tax code that taxes profits that doesn't allow deducting expenses, and there is no obviously right answer as to how you should define corporate residency for a transnational corporation.

I'm not talking about any. I was trying to pre-empt the counter that I hear brought up a lot here that "tax breaks are paid for by lobbyists"

The relative merits of US GAAP vs Irish GAAP are comparatively irrelevant. Choose one and stick to it

If I operate in both countries, what's the process for me to tell the "other" country to "stick it, I'm using the other country's accounting and tax policies"?

The problem is not with the companies, the politicians, the laws, or the lobbyists separately.

The problem is with the system composed of all of these parts.

* Companies work for their shareholders.

* Lobbyists work for their companies.

* Politicians work for...us. They're also the one group that if they STOPPED their involvement in the "system" would cause lobbying to be pointless. Instead they fester an "us vs. them" attitude and hope

If I hired you to do a job and you took on a freelance job doing favors for your dinner buddy on work time and started ignoring your day job - you'd get fired so fast it's not even funny. Unfortunately, we don't treat congress members like that.

If I hired you to write code and never looked at a single line you wrote[1], but instead held performance reviews based on how well your personal marketing department tweeted...

1: quick, tell me the name of your representative, the name of the last bill they co-sponsored, and a few of the legal concepts that bill dealt with.

Yup, that's a pretty good point. Politicians don't work for us, they work for themselves. Our input is only to vote some of them in, and in aggregate, we vote based on the media impression they themselves orchestrate.

Wealth begets power begets law begets wealth.

The deductions (or avoidance) is "legal" because it follows the letter of laws ... bought and paid for by companies which see 100:1, 1,000:1, or 1,000,000:1 returns on their lobbying "expenses" securing just this.

Until and unless money's influence is removed from politics, this will be the case.

You can't remove money from politics, the only reason politics exists is because government gets to decide who gets what money.

Not even the staunchest libertarian thinks the government would work with no revenue, or that politicians shouldn't be allowed to manage the money of the state.

The parent wasn't talking about the government allocating money, they were talking about government members being given money in exchange for influence. Sure, in both cases it's money, but you can remove one and still have the other.

I strongly suspect your first premise (that money cannot be removed from politics) is correct, though I disagree with your interpretation/rationale.

The point that financial wealth and political power are simply two (of several) dimensions of power means, though, that the influence of money on politics cannot be ignored.

Well, you said it yourself. The companies do lobby for loopholes, knowing they will be better off than other. As a results, the companies in question have at least the same share of blame as the politicians.

Blaming lobbyists for lobbying is like blaming ants for finding piles of sugar that are carelessly left around.

The government is supposed to consist of our better angels that act in a more ethical manner to a higher standard than the cogs just functioning in the system that the government creates.

If the government doesn't consist of these better angels, why do we give it such vast and sweeping powers to invade and control our lives?

That's like saying "don't blame the murderer, blame police for not saving you while you were being continuously stabbed for two hours"...

If the police actively helped the murderers, I'd certainly blame them.

That's a poor analogy since murder is illegal. What Google is doing is within the law and a part of the framework created by the government.

Tax dodging is also against the spirit of the law, which is a direct result of companies lobbying for loopholes they can use. Said companies are the initiators, not the corrupt/dumb politicians (who are, of course, also to blame).

It's not "tax dodging", it's "tax avoidance", since what they've done is not only legal, but it's the expected and allowed behavior under tax law adjudication in the USA.

You misunderstand how tax laws work to think that there is some "spirit of the law" that individuals or corporate entities should be attempting to follow. There are simply the rules that must be followed and some wiggle room in how those rules are interpreted.

A "spirit" implies that there is some sort of equality between parties and a mutual understanding of something not quite written down. That's not the way that a judge views tax law. If the IRS can't clearly show how rules have been broken, then the IRS has no claim. The government/IRS write the rules and they're expected to write rules in a watertight fashion, not some vague "spirit of the agreement" fashion. If the government or IRS fails to do so, it's not viewed as the tax avoider's problem.

At the end of the day, tax accountants and tax attorneys are trained and paid to ensure that you (or your company) don't pay a penny more of taxes than are explicitly required by the law and it would be unethical for them to do otherwise.

>It's not "tax dodging", it's "tax avoidance"

Ah, I see why someone like you would think it's completely acceptable.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dodge

>dodge

>1 - Avoid (someone or something) by a sudden quick movement:

...

I know the US judiciary system works with the laws by the letter. And I know that examples like this prove again and again that it's not always the optimal way to do things.

Sometimes I wonder why people think USA is that different from Russia. Ethics are non-existent in both countries.

Go for a dictionary that defines dodge wrt to taxation:

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/ta...

It's a technique that can be illegal. That's not what Google has done. Google has used tax avoidance.

More info on Tax Avoidance vs Evasion (which is what a Tax Dodge commonly refers to): https://www.translegal.com/legal-english-lessons/tax-avoidan...

Sometimes I wonder why people think USA is that different from Russia. Ethics are non-existent in both countries.

You're confused about the greater ethical question here. The ethical question of whether or not a company should pay its "fair share" of taxes is below the ethical question of "How should laws be enforced by a Government that can use deadly force and incarceration to achieve its aims?"

The Government writes the laws and has all the power. It is absolutely incumbent upon the Government to make the laws clear and not try to enforce their whims based upon flimsy unwritten "spirit of the law" arguments.

Yes, it can be illegal. But it also can be legal. Therefore it's exactly what's Google done. I'm talking in normal English, not in American lawyers' English.

But sure, keep being an apologist and call people who blame, among other things, the actual source of the problems "confused". Oh wait, you don't seem to consider that a problem. You just shift the entirety of the blame on some theoretical "Government" entity, because that entity didn't think of every imaginable and unimaginable way one could circumvent a law, while still keeping the laws clear.

Then I'm sorry, we have nothing more to talk about.

"that entity didn't think of every imaginable and unimaginable way one could circumvent a law"

That is factually untrue of the loopholes exploited. Many of these loopholes were put in place explicitly to benefit the cronyists. Others have been in place for some time, but the lawmakers and the IRS don't want to fix them. Government has the power. They write the laws. They even make the rules regarding legal lobbying.

Blaming the corporations that legally lobby and follow the tax laws is like blaming a child who acts like a brat because his parents are crappy parents. You blame the rule makers and those in power a great deal more than you blame those who are just following the rules.

As someone who is intensely interested in how regional differences in people's education affect their political outlook, I sincerely want to ask you where you went to high school.

I realize that response sounds condescending and I'm trying to think off a way to make it sound not condescending, but I am failing. Your statement so strongly contradicts what I learned growing up that blinked in surprise and had to take a step back and reconsider a belief that I didn't realize I'd never questioned.

I went to high school near Albany, New York and we were taught that the framers of the constitution started their design from the premise that humans are flawed and corruptible and that they needed to build a system to counter that. Hence, checks and balances. I guess all of the reading I've done since then on the founding of the country has agreed with this, but I suspect if there was some that disagreed with it, I would have missed that.

> Poorly written, lazy or "bought-for" laws are being used exactly as they are worded

Not really. The IRS for one has open to them a very wide avenue of interpretation for many tax laws.

You're missing the point. The wide latitude that the IRS has in its interpretation of tax law is part of the design that was bought.

The problem is definitely the companies.

They're the ones exploiting the system.

I'm not sure what your agenda is, but the problem is definitely the companies.

If they just paid their fair share with a little bit of mild tax dodging no-one would give a fuck. But they're taking the fucking piss at the moment, generating billions in revenue and then not paying for any of the infrastructure which is supporting their business.

You have to account for competition.

Suppose there are two companies with the same business model, operating in the same countries etc. One files taxes "fairly" and one minimizes its tax burden as far as the law will allow. Which one do you think is going to be in business for longer? Which one would you buy shares in?

You can get as angry as you like at the companies, or the legislators, but in the end it's the system you need to be scrutinizing.

This is clearly nonsense, what serious competition does Google have in Europe? Or Apple? Apple are making billions in profits, they have no competitive need for lower prices!

Also this is an advantage only massive multinationals have, so again, complete nonsense as they're already past that stage.

But what is their fair share? The governments of Ireland, the Netherlands and Bermuda say they are paying their fair share. Other countries obviously disagree.

>The problem is definitely the companies. They're the ones exploiting the system.

Who implements the system? The politicians that you and I elect and the corporations buy off, right? So who's fault is it really, the people who exploit the system, the people in charge of that system, or the people who put faith in the system giving it power?

It's not that they're applying for an exemption or anything, they're doing crazy contortions to get this to work. It's an unintended consequence of the complexity of tax law that take a long time to fix.

If you could get away with murder because of a loophole, would you?

Say it would make a company more profitable, killing their rivals. Do they suddenly have a legal obligation to as a company to increase their profits?

Or do you behave ethically and within the spirit of the law, regardless of the law loophole?

So why is it ok to dodge the fiscal responsibility to contribute to the societies you are operating in?

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