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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

Do you realize that Google, Facebook, Oracle et al. are US companies? These companies all benefited from the stable business climate that the US government largely provides(stable judicial system, Delaware Companies, a stable financial system, State University systems that provide research grants that made Google possible in first place etc.) So why should these Corporations that benefitted from that not pay their fare share of taxes? I hate pay taxes too but I pay them and I understand that they pay for services I benefit from. You sound both naive and uninformed. Its a farce that American companies that make billions pay almost no tax on those profits while us little people shoulder the burden. Did you actually read the article?

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The "fair share" rhetoric so frequently deployed in these contexts would be more convincing if US corporate tax policy was more in line with international norms and if less tax revenue funded policies ranging from wasteful to downright immoral.

'Normalizing' taxes with the rest of the world would be a massive taxes increase on huge numbers of companies. We might have a high nominal rate, but companies can often get vary low effective tax rates. Arguably, what we need is a corporate AMT and a lower top tax bracket. Otherwise some companies focus on paying zero taxes where others simply focus on being profitable.

It's not just the nominal rate.

The average effective corporate tax rate is also quite a bit higher for the US than other developed countries; according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Bank, 27.9% versus an OECD average of 15.9%. [1 citing 2] The right wing think-tank AEI reported a smaller disparity of about 9% a few years earlier. [3] For what it's worth, these rates are fairly variable over the years.

So "huge numbers" seems like quite a stretch.

Moreover, I used the broader term "policies" rather than "rates" for a reason. The US's worldwide taxation scheme, for instance, is in itself problematic.

[1] http://barbwire.com/2014/10/15/analysis-are-us-corporate-tax...

[2] http://www.doingbusiness.org/~/media/GIAWB/Doing%20Business/...

[3] http://www.aei.org/article/economics/fiscal-policy/taxes/rep...

After examining 288 corporations that where consistently profitable every year for 5 years. On average they "paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 19.4 percent." Which is close to the "15.9 percent" you linked.

However, "Twenty-six of the corporations, including Boeing, General Electric, Priceline.com and Verizon, paid no federal income tax at all over the five year period. A third of the corporations (93) paid an effective tax rate of less than ten percent over that period."

The point is with such high variability in tax rate's companies spend a lot of time looking for ways to avoid paying taxes vs. building better products etc.

PS: Yea, just like the articles you linked this is also biased but the numbers are not made up. http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers/sorrystateofcorptaxes...

> Arguably, what we need is a corporate AMT and a lower top tax bracket.

AMT is a farce created by people who don't understand math. Here's the simplest example: Suppose you have a company with a billion dollars in revenue and a billion dollars in expenses. It has no profit. It will pay no taxes. AMT will only cause it to fold because expenses + taxes now exceeds revenue. The same will be true of any company with net profit less than the minimum tax rate.

The same applies to personal income AMT, the only reason it hasn't imploded in on itself in the same way is that rich individuals typically have a higher percentage of "disposable income" than business entities, so instead the AMT "only" makes rich people donate less money to charity and other causes we considered sufficiently worthy to make tax deductible until the AMT decided to put them back on the same footing as yachts and caviar.

>would be more convincing if US corporate tax policy was more in line with international norm

Ok, just as soon as we tax the wealthy at the same rate as international norms.

Fair share, there is no reason for your silly quotes, means that if an individual's marginal tax rate is 35% then a corporations should never be zero. There's nothing rhetorical about it. Where and how a government allocates that tax revenue is completely irrelevant to the responsibility of meeting ones tax obligations which are very clearly defined in the US tax code. You sound like a dingbat.

What's that got to do with Ireland? If the US believes it's entitled to taxes, then it should make that the law. I don't see how some third party county can modify local US law.

Those billions are made outside of US. And I think that their Irish branches are separate companies, not american.

As a 'quirk' of the way Irish law works some of these subsiduaries don't actually belong to any country

> Do you realize that Google, Facebook, Oracle et al. are US companies?

No! Really??? Tell me more!

> You sound both naive and uninformed

Maybe, but I'm pretty sure I've spent more time studying and thinking about these issue than you have, given how you are posting such a dismissive response with no actual substance to it.

> Did you actually read the article?

Well, let's see... I quoted a snippet directly from the article, and replied to it. So yeah, I think it's safe to say I read the article. Did you?

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