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Comment by jussij | Hacker News Reader

It is not just the super rich running this scam but almost every multi-national.

Just take Apple as one example.

Apple is sitting on close to $300+ billion in cash in some offshore tax haven, just to make sure that cash is located outside of the USA to insure it does not attract any tax.

This wide spread multi-national tax avoidance has been running at epidemic levels for many decades now.

From what I recall Google started this scam and it is still the master of avoiding tax and while the populous is happy to vote in governments that turn a blind eye to this practice, it will remain a very lucrative endeavour.

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Yes, but you're missing the half of the equation where everyone who is a senior employee gets granted or grants themselves large amounts of stock options, then decides to funnel this tax free hoard of wealth into stock buybacks.

It's the most direct and massive transfer of wealth from normal and poor people to rich in the history of any society. It's disgusting and despicable, anyone who owns equities in 2019 needs to recognize they have become a part of this amoral system and work to reform it.

We are literally destroying billions of dollars every day to enrich a handful of shareholders (who are already the richest humans that ever lived by any metric). It's the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of humanity squared, and it's only increasing.

Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter. Everyone else copies Google. This heist is happening right now, today, in the open, and it's totally legal.

> Google broke records and made headlines by announcing an unprecedented $25 billion in buybacks for this quarter.

This sort of tax avoidance has been going on for decades.

As just one example see the link below to see how Google has been avoiding it's tax responsibility here in Australia:

https://www.smh.com.au/business/google-paying-a-fraction-of-...

If that same level of tax avoidance was perpetrated by an individual they would be facing decades in prison.

Imagine all these uncollected taxes that could be used to properly fund public services like healthcare, etc.

These businesses are actively stealing the citizens from their essential services.

What you call a scam, I call healthy competition between nation-states, with the fringe benefit of keeping everyone honest.

The only thing that's sad in the story is that this kind of deal is only accessible to large corps and HNWI, and not to the middle class of each country.

> healthy competition between nation-states

Competition yes, but healthy? Only if you think taxation is all bad, and government should be as small as possible, period. It is a race to the bottom.

Personally I believe that healthy is when there is a power balance between democratically controlled government and privately owned business. They should be about equal in power. In many western countries, especially the US, the power balance has shifted completely toward business. Business can dictate law and make governments compete with one another for their money.

This is obviously the wrong way around, it undermines democracy (aka the people) and benefits business owners (aka the rich). Business should compete with another, governments should set rules for their markets. If a country votes for high taxes and generous public services, this should be priced in by business, not undermined and circumvented.

>Competition yes, but healthy? Only if you think taxation is all bad, and government should be as small as possible, period. It is a race to the bottom.

I'm not hearing anything remotely bad in this sentence.

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