Google Used Loopholes To Avoid Paying $3.1 Billion In Taxes
And good for them, as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s every individual, and every company’s, duty to pay as little in taxes as possible.
Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.
Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.
“It’s remarkable that Google’s effective rate is that low,” said Martin A. Sullivan, a tax economist who formerly worked for the U.S. Treasury Department. “We know this company operates throughout the world mostly in high-tax countries where the average corporate rate is well over 20 percent.”
This is usually where the class warfare takes over. Google is a gigantic and very profitable company and thus should be paying through taxes through the nose, say the class warriors. The fact that Google is able to shift income overseas and avoid paying America’s 2nd-highest-in-the-world corporate tax rate (among other taxes) infuriates them and prompts calls for laws closing the loopholes.
But here’s the thing: If we want companies like Google to stop shifting income overseas, if we want American businesses in general to keep there business here in the United States, we should stop taxing and regulating them to death.
Lower the national corporate tax rate. Lower state corporate tax rates. Deregulate. Stop punishing these companies for being big and successful. Then these companies will keep their profits and operations in the United States.
Of course, this is anathema to the left. They’d rather have you believe that these companies move their profits and operations overseas because they’re greedy and hate Americans or something. The truth is that liberalism does more to drive outsourcing and off-shoring than anything else.
Tags: google, off shoring, outsourcing, Taxes
