This is not what I mean. Replace Microsoft tax with an auto repair shop's taxes. Everything produced and installed and serviced locally.
1) Sales tax/VAT. On the full amount of the sales, not just the lowest they can get away with. That's 10-27% depending on the location. No interstate commerce exception. No import/export exception.
2) Corporate tax in the local jurisdiction. That's the 14% tax rate (and there are jurisdictions where this is 35%). This comes on top of the sales tax of course.
3) Capital gains or profit tax in the local jurisdiction, on the company side (there is ALSO capital gains tax on the investor side, it's not either/or everywhere). This is going to be somewhere from 0% in some (few) places, 15% (normal) up to 58% (in jurisdictions where capital gains is taxed like income) (note that this will be charged before buybacks or dividend payouts are allowed). Auto repair shops don't get to pick ... why should Microsoft ?
This is ignoring lots of varied taxes, TAX DEALS, real estate investments, owned real estate, depreciation for machines being allowed or not, any investment/loan taxes, ...
Now we have a minimum of 35% tax, up to 81% tax, on any amount of money that shows up in the share price or is paid out to investors.
THAT's the figure to be compared to the 14% tax rate. THAT's why Walmart and "brick&mortar" retailers feel slighted.
THAT's why everybody should be angry as hell at people like European Commission president Juncker, as he was one of the pioneers of allowing companies evade tax within Europe. Of course, that's also why it won't ever be fixed without replacing most/all of the political establishment in Europe (but US is not that different)
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/04/08/trump-is-right-ama...
That's wrong and impossible to support in fact. You can spot a fraudulent claim like that easily because it wings an arbitrary number that on the surface appears absurd (and as it turns out, is).
Tax Microsoft at the OECD median, their net income for 2018 would be about ~$25 billion. Their tax rate for Q1 was 14%, which is comparable to the effective corporate tax rate in much of Europe.
So you don't like their 14% rate and think it's too low? How would raising that to 18% or 20% change anything fundamentally? It wouldn't. And it certainly wouldn't "rapidly shrink [them] to 10% of their current size." Whether their net income is $23b or $26b or $28b annually, Microsoft remains worth a similar value as to what they are today (ie well over half a trillion dollars).
The same holds true for Facebook, Apple and Google.
Making ridiculous claims without anything supporting them, doesn't make for a very good argument position.