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> But mostly it's just a smokescreen to ignore how terrible our corporate income tax system is and it's rates are among the highest in the world.

I think it makes sense to look at outcomes. It's a fun intellectual exercise to look at the thousands of pages of tax guidance from many tax advisors on lots of different structures within a complex tax system, and analyse the tax rates, which include some high top-end marginal rates.

But at the end of the day, tax revenues as a percentage of GDP in the US are 26%. That's well below the EU (world's largest economy, biggest block of developed countries) of 35%, and well below the OECD (world's largest economies) of 34%.

It's kind of a myth that the US has some of the world's highest taxes. Perhaps it has some high tax rates, but after all the exemptions and deductions etc, the result is a relatively low tax burden, about 1/3rd lower than the average of other developed countries.

Most of those exemptions are relevant, and anyways, the accounting of what constitutes income can be deceiving. I worked in china for 9 years and paid 0% USA taxes because I took a foreign tax credit (I still filled all my income in the 1040). Should that be counted as USA income? Does my 0% drag the average down? Likewise, if that 24% includes foreign income and tax credits, then it is in no way comparable to European numbers that don't include foreign income at all (since no one else taxes global income except a small country in Africa, which isn't a big economy).

The grandparent referred to tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, which is a measure designed to compare the tax burden across countries without having to delve into the various ways of measuring income, applying tax credits, and balancing the tax base across income, consumption and capital. You just look at the total tax collected and divide it by GDP. Your employment in China didn't contribute to US tax revenues or (directly) to US GDP, so it is ignored.

How do they estimate the domestic GDP contribution of a company to then compute its effective tax rate? Or are they just taking total GDP divided by total tax collected for an overall tax burden? In that case, do these numbers say anything specifically about corporate taxation at all?

They don't; yes; no.

The US is also one, if not the only country, where citizens working/living abroad are still expected to file US taxes (even if there is a credit).

As a green card holder, I too am expected for the lifetime of the green card to pay US taxes, even if I were to move back to my home country and never set foot in the US. This is unheard of anywhere else.

The Company’s effective tax rates for 2015, 2014 and 2013 differ from the statutory federal income tax rate of 35% due primarily to certain undistributed foreign earnings, a substantial portion of which was generated by subsidiaries organized in Ireland, for which no U.S. taxes are provided when such earnings are intended to be indefinitely reinvested outside the U.S.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0001193125153...

One thing that confuses me in discussions of corporate taxes: Because taxes are incorporated into the price of all products sold (COGS), all taxes are paid by the customer in the end. Seems very inefficient to me, let's just get on with a wealth tax (forget income or VAT (aka flat-tax)).

Products sell for what the customer will pay, no less, no more. Studies show that taxes tend to come out of the owner's share - they're paid by the owners of the business.

If people are paying $1 for hamburgers today, and the owner gets a tax cut, will hamburgers be sold for less? Doubtful.

If all hamburger producers get a tax cut, then some of them will be able to reduce their prices, so hamburgers will be sold for less.

Can you cite some of those studies? The effective incidence of corporate income tax is controversial. With internationally mobile capital and immobile labour, a source-based corporate income tax theoretically has no impact on shareholders and results in lower wages for domestic workers, an observation supported by some empirical studies [1].

[1] Mirrlees et al, Tax by Design (2011), p 438, citing Hassett and Mathur (2006) and Arulampalam, Devereux, and Maffini (2007). You can get a PDF at http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/5353.

I passionately disagree with the concept of a wealth tax, unless it's only on new wealth (also known as income), because otherwise you're taxing money that has already been taxed. Money should only be taxed once.

All of that said, I strongly agree with your first point. People pay corporate taxes through: 1) higher prices for products and services, 2) less employment, 3) lower returns on investments (a lot of people have 401Ks). Corporate taxes just obscure a person's tax burden.

I see the argument again and again that money should only be taxed once. I don't understand it. It seems like such an arbitrary principle. Why should money not be taxed more than once, if the result would be a wealthier and fairer society?

Money is circulating, thus the concept of taxing it only once seems a bit silly. We could argue endlessly who is really paying which taxes. E.g. if you tax income you are really just obscuring the fact that you are taxing the company who is paying this income, but the company will rise prices accordingly, so it's actually a hidden tax on consumption, etc.

We don't need to speculate.

Apple paid a 25.4% tax rate on their income last year.

That's a relatively high effective tax rate compared to the effective tax rates in nearly all developed nations.

Duh, except Apple isn't paying that foreign income tax.

Apple, which has some 6,000 workers in Ireland, says its Irish units paid the parent company a licensing fee to use the intellectual property in its products. The Irish companies didn't own the IP, so they don’t owe tax on it in Ireland, Apple says, but the units will face a U.S. tax bill when they repatriate the profits. Apple expects to pay about 26 percent of its earnings in tax for the most recent fiscal year and has set aside some $32 billion to cover taxes it says it will face should overseas income be returned to the U.S.

That day will never come.

A repatriation tax holiday is being talked about. A whole bunch. I think it's currently priced into the market.

> That's the rate it must pay if it repatriates overseas profits, there is little it can do to change that. other than not repatriate.

(A) "if".

(B) Not even necessarily; [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_holiday

Your tax knowledge needs a lot of work. The point of Apple's tax evasion strategies is that despite selling a lot of product in the USA, Apple's paperwork shows very little profit in the USA and therefore pays no taxes.

Apple hasn't paid a cent of tax on that $246 billion, for one.

"How Apple paid just 0.005% tax on its global profits"

http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/30/technology/apple-tax-ruling-...

> The "double dutch" strategy revolved around how much value you assigned to your IP and moving that IP to tax favorable countries. It's no longer legal or used.

It is still legal and used.

It's amusing that you claim their tax knowledge needs work, when the facts prove your premise to be wrong.

Fact: most of Apple's global income taxes, are domestic. Apple's paperwork shows immense domestic profit.

Of Apple's $15.64 billion in income taxes for fiscal 2016, $8.64 billion of that was domestic, with a further $4.9 billion domestic deferred. Foreign income taxes out of the $15.64b, was a mere $2.11 billion.