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Originally Posted by ApK
I can't fault any individual or company for trying to find all legal means to reduce their tax burden. I'd rather see your ire redirected at our Congress to push for tax code reform to reduce both the need and opportunity to do stuff like that.
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Companies could then move to actually have much more of their operations overseas (rather than just have the operations overseas on paper, as with Apple).
The law is a blunt and imperfect instrument to obtain moral behavior. Some of it has to come from feelings of shame and guilt. I don't think Steve Jobs would have felt shame from this week's revelations, but hopefully the current crowd running the company will.
My impression is that Apple is worse on this than the norm.
Originally from the New York Times:
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. . . the findings about Apple were remarkable both for the enormous amount of money involved and the audaciousness of the company’s assertion that its subsidiaries are beyond the reach of any taxing authority.
“There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this,” said Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and a former staff director at the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “Unbelievable chutzpah.”
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Maybe the problem is that in a world of multi-national companies, with patriotism to the headquarters country unlikely to shape corporate behavior, corporate income tax won't work. Then we might as well end corporate income tax and make all the other taxes higher to compensate. In the end, isn't it really customers who are paying the corporate income tax? In defense for having just made a highly political statement: I'm far from sure I'm correct.