It is not the case at all. Yes the biggest tech giants that do not pay enough tax are mostly from the US (also other companies from other countries are affected too)
But it is not because they are from the US that this new tax is created. It is simply because they don't pay enough tax
Home town legal decisions are the norm. Gerrymandered electorates are the majority. The american exceptionalism of we can but you can't is openly embraced by all in politics and the media. Regulatory capture is the norm. Revolving door Washington lobbyists is not even a story anymore.
Cheating is an absolute way of life nowadays. Which is really, really strange because it seems to me that most Americans really don't like cheats and cheating. Brady.
The rest of your comment refutes this. They might pay it sometime in the future, but they are not paying it by parking it abroad.
By comparison, most European countries don't tax companies on foreign earnings at all.
Or they wait for good deals to come up to bring the funds back home at a fraction of the cost.
Meanwhile it's easy to get domestic loans based on foreign assets which gives them easy access to spend that same money locally.
Put it in safe low yield securities on the other side, take out low interest loans here and profit on the tax money which should have been paid at the expense of small competitors who don't have the scale for tax scams or the lobbyists to legalize them.
You call this a "scam" when in reality it's the system working as designed, so I don't think you have a particularly good grasp on this subject. Again, in most countries companies don't pay taxes on foreign income at all.
Things are indeed working as designed, designed by the people who it benefits through regulatory capture, lobbying, and campaign finance, that part shouldn't be hard to understand.
If it were "working as designed" there wouldn't be a trend of global cooperation in closing these tax loopholes and you wouldn't be reading an article about France working to close one.
>If they bring the money back in to pay back the loans they'll pay taxes on it.
While profiting from the capital which should have been paid in taxes for decades, and more importantly out competing their smaller rivals out of the market because they didn't have the resources, scope, or moral infortitude to engage in similar behaviors.
Would that it were we all could avoid our financial obligations and paying our fair share long as we did so eventually while being called heroic.
Again, most countries - including most European countries - don't Levy taxes on foreign company earnings at all. If Google were not a US company, they wouldn't be taxed on any foreign earnings even without any kind of money parking abroad.
If I lived in Nevada instead of California I wouldn't have to pay state income tax so by your logic I should just stop paying?
Once companies get big enough they get to arbitrarily choose which sets of laws to follow?
People don't have to pay for groceries at food banks so we can walk around the checkouts at Safeway?
No, my point is that Californians shouldn't point to Nevada and say they're not paying their fair share of taxes.
Google isn't dodging any French taxes, and isn't dodging American taxes either. What people are complaining about is the fact that American companies' foreign earnings aren't taxes until those earnings are brought into the country. This is not against the law, since companies aren't forced to move that money back into the country. And to put the cherry on top, most countries don't tax companies on foreign earnings at all.
So France is trying to say that they are being disadvantaged because these companies are delaying payment of American taxes, on earnings that wouldn't be taxed at all in France or most other European countries. This is blatant hypocrisy. France is complaining that American isn collecting taxes too slowly on earnings that it and it's peers don't tax at all. If European countries think corporations should pay taxes on foreign earnings, maybe they should begin with taxing their own corporations' foreign earnings first.
They can do convoluted accounting with loans and subsidiaries and the like to bring it into the country anyway with the unwinding and tax paying left into the far future.
Unfortunately in these cases, perception is just as important as the nominal reason.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/02/amazon-ha...
From the article: "On average the thousands of staff who handle orders received about £3,000 per person last year. Senior staff will have taken home considerably more.
Amazon’s share price has surged 84% in the last two years. Last year the shares vested at an average stock price of $992, in 2016 it was $704 and in 2015 $467.
The payouts will have reduced Amazon’s tax bill because under UK tax law companies are required to deduct the vest value of the shares provided to employees."