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What a surprise. But still we should continue to think about them as a company working to make the world a better place... Everything is fine.

• jbob2000 8y ago
  This assumes that paying tax makes the world a better place. I am sure Bill Gates has played similar accounting tricks and look, he's about to rid the world of Malaria. Yes tax dollars are used for social good, but they also fund the military and provide subsidies for all sorts of nefarious industries.
  • tashoecraft 8y ago
    If you don't like what your tax dollars fund, elect different politicians.
  • decebalus1 8y ago
    The fact that tax money is perceived as mismanaged is never an excuse to avoid paying taxes. That's a different problem with it's own solution. At least a citizen has the theoretical power to vote out people who mismanage tax money. You don't get a say about how a billionaire spends his/hers money. Actually, most of them are hoarding it. And the corporations holding the money become more powerful, being able to greatly influence the aforementioned mechanism of voting. It's a bad thing. A very bad thing and I'm very sad people are not more outraged about this.
    • nv-vn 8y ago
      I hear this all the time but I don't understand what hoarding means in this context. Surely you're not implying that the majority of any billionaire's wealth is just cash under their mattress? I'm fairly sure that most of any given billionaire's wealth is invested, often in equities or bonds. In that sense, they are letting others borrow their money and funding economic development. Same goes for money sitting in a bank that gets loaned out.
    • sokoloff 8y ago
      Why should I get a say in how a billionaire spends their money? That I don't get a say is a feature, not a bug, because the minute I get a say, someone else gets a say in my private affairs.
• 21 8y ago
  They are making the world a better place. They are fighting Trump (which by the way wants to lower taxation on the rich)
  • tomcam 8y ago
    Wow. That’s revealing.
• oh_sigh 8y ago
  > The tax strategy, known as the “Double Irish, Dutch Sandwich”, is legal
  • m_b 8y ago
    It's legal means it's the right thing to do?
    • ucaetano 8y ago
      Well, let me know when you claim zero deductions on your tax return.
      • happytoexplain 8y ago
        I've seen this curt analogy a lot in this thread, but I haven't seen anybody explain how it's comparable.
        • fixermark 8y ago
          It highlights the notion that taxation policy is inherently amoral (or, more specifically, a patchwork of overlapping morality and ethical frameworks and the laws resulting from that multi-framework pileup; it's the ultimate sausage of the legal sausage-making process). To highlight it, people highlight the hypocrisy of individuals using the law to minimize the money they pay out while criticizing corporations using the law to minimize the money they pay out. While you can argue there is a difference, doing so puts you in an ethical framework that not all people in the discourse might share.
        • ucaetano 8y ago
          Everyone tries to legally minimize the amount of taxes they pay, often resorting to procedures with names such as "backdoor ROTH" or "Mega Backdoor Roth IRA". But when those same people see a company doing the same, they get pissed off and call it unethical, "not the right thing", etc. TL;DR: companies are fighting for their interests, just like people are.
    • 8y ago
• golfer 8y ago
  Pick your favorite giant tech company. Guess what? Whoever it is has also used extreme tax-avoidance strategies. Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Netflix, Amazon, etc.
  • m_b 8y ago
    You are absolutely right, and none should be doing it.
    • ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
      Then change the rules.
    • fixermark 8y ago
      Why not? I've seen it asserted multiple times in this thread, by multiple people, that these tax strategies are an inherent bad, but I haven't seen explanation as to why.
      • consp 8y ago
        Generally the way these constructions work is that they use local resources (infrastructure, public education, subsidies, etc) and pay zero to no tax on the usage of it. Google has a presence in both the Netherlands and Ireland but pays very little taxes in both (if not none). Basically what google does here is avoid general taxes in multiple countries (with the structure mentioned they can pay almost none in other countries as well) and still have offices and people working there. You could argue those people get paid, but since most countries (at least in Europe) burden both the employer and employee with the cost of almost everything public, it is unfair to the employee to let the employer not pay taxes due on usage of the infrastructure and public works and let the employer (the corporation) take advantage of it. The American view (I get) is that you are on your own and should arrange this for yourself as well, but due to this requiring quite substantial resources to pull of, it is unbalanced in favor of the corporations. You might consider it fair if they pay taxes as soon as the money is transferred to a person, but due to these schemes it never sees the light of day in any of the countries it was transferred from and thus doesn't go where it was supposed to go. There are methods for people to do this as well in the two countries in the system mentioned, but it is way more difficult in terms of effort required and gains gained and impossible if you are an employee and not an owner of a (one man) business.
• casefields 8y ago
  You know how the left makes it hell for Republicans to go out in public around DC? Whichever group is mad enough, is going to start going after all these executives. It's going to get uncomfortable. Class warfare is coming and it's going to get nasty.