Better yet, dump corporate tax altogether and simply enforce a global flat tax on all forms of personal income, both capital gains and salary.

The amount of human time and energy wasted on taxation is mind bogglingly stupid.

Politicians trying to influence the behavior of their minions by designing these convoluted "tax-based incentive" schemes is the whole problem in the first place.

Just tax all money that comes into anyones hands at say 30% and let the market decide what activity is most efficient for the world.

Then maybe the 500 million intelligent people working around the globe as tax authorities, tax attorneys, tax lobbyists, tax preparers, tax accountants, and tax consultants...could spend their time doing more useful things for humanity.

There is no single change that could be made to tax policy that'd fix this. Instead, we have to find ways to empower the government and make them willing to take what's ours - ours in the sense that the people deserve that their representatives take hold of what belongs to the people. Individual changes to policy will force the artistic accountants to devise new workarounds.

> simply enforce a global flat tax

Enforced by whom?

Why would a developing country want to tax companies at the same level if they're trying to attract investments? Anyway, why should any country listen to any other country on what the tax rate should be?

Why should a company be forced to pay tax on foreign income if the country in which they supposedly made that income doesn't want to them to pay taxes?

The worst part is that this comment starts with "simply enforce"

> Why would a developing country want to tax companies at the same level

The point of removing corporate tax is to not tax companies at all. Remove the decision of how to position your country against others altogether.

You could enforce these things by creating a free-trade area for anybody who joins, and excluding or putting stiff tariffs on those who don't.

> You could enforce these things by creating a free-trade area for anybody who joins, and excluding those who don't.

Then you need those free trade agreements. Remember the last time when it was only between EU and US? Protests in many European countries and in the end Trump decided to break it off.

>dump corporate tax altogether and simply enforce a global flat tax on all forms of personal income

No thanks, you have no right to tell us (Switzerland) how much taxes we have to pay. First fix your own US-tax-system.

EDIT: I think he meant that:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/11/bidens-plan...

Agreed, trying to get the whole world to agree on a single tax rate (0 or otherwise) is unrealistic, and completely ignores the sovereignty of countries to design their tax system as they please. What needs to happen is a modernized way to calculate which percentage of global profits from each company are taxable in which country, and then leave it up to each country how to tax that (or not). The current system lets companies cook the books in a way where they can effectively relocate their profits to any country they want.

Absolutely that would be a fair a good thing.

I think the author of your quote meant global as in "one form for all USA taxes related to income", not as in "international".

> Better yet, dump corporate tax altogether and simply enforce a global flat tax on all forms of personal income, both capital gains and salary.

Fraudsters skirted that by keeping their corporation's assets on the books and expensing everything, never actually receiving/spending anything themselves.

People are already incentivized to do that in the current system. How does removing corporate tax make that any different?

By removing the audit of the corporations.

No need to cook the books if the government already gave you everything that you'd otherwise have to lie to obtain!

Small sibgle owner companies do that a lot. Big multinationals? No

Because they don't have to. They would go back to that in a heartbeat if they had to. It's about maximizing shareholder's revenues, post-tax.

There would be no way to do that with a giant public company.

Instead of distributing profits to shareholders, is Microsoft going to buy 1,000,000 BMWs for their investors and hold them on their books as company cars to dodge taxes? Not practical.

Is Ireland not a democracy? Can't they vote to change their own tax laws if they have a problem with them?

I am from Ireland and from talking to friends and family most people are pretty happy with it. We give them a pass on taxes and they employ thousands of high end engineers here. We then collect large income tax revenues from these workers and subsidise the rest of the country.

Perhaps all countries should adopt 0% corporate tax then, if it's so beneficial.

You joke, but some types of taxes are objectively worse than others. An ideal tax would have to generate sufficient revenue, be non-distortionary, inexpensive, and fair.

We can argue about what's "fair" all day, but "inexpensive" is more objective: some taxes hamper more economic activity than others. A $1 tax on a stock trade will reduce exactly $1 of economic activity. It's so expensive, it's basically pointless. A land value tax, on the other land, is almost free. (And in some cases, negative!)

Most taxes fall somewhere between these two extremes, but corporate income taxes are one of the most expensive, which is why economists aren't big fans of them.

That would probably level the playing field between small companies and big companies, TBH.

Yes, skim off trillions of potential tax revenues of other countries to earn a billion or two as a single country. Effectively a Prisoner's dilemma on an international scale.

Countries like Ireland and the Netherlands are nothing more than tax avoidance puppets of a few big companies. And the sad thing is that their governments think it's good what they do while it's a downwards spiral instead.

The problem is not that Ireland gives a good deal to companies in Ireland, the problem is that Microsoft can falsely pretend that their Irish branch is the one making all the profit and then not having to pay any tax elsewhere.

It's not the citizens of a pirate nation that are unhappy with piracy. It's the rest of us.

Actually, no. The Apple case [0] is still pending some more layers of appeals, but both sides accept that Ireland doesn't have complete carte blanche to set its own tax laws. The EU gets to participate in setting them too.

Of course, Irish citizens could vote to withdraw from the EU and set their own tax that way, but that's not likely - they generally accept that the benefits of participating in the EU are worth giving up a little sovereignty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_v_Commission

I'd love for Ireland to withdraw from the EU - that would make it much, much likelier that the rest of us could get a consensus on anti-profit-shifting tax reform with the biggest tax haven out of the union.

This is you assuming "democracy" actually works to empower average people to make these types of changes, instead of being co-opted or controlled by these same corporate behemoths.

They don't want to. These companies employ thousands and thousands of people in Ireland and pay them pretty well. In the bigger picture it's probably in their collective interest to tax them more but there's a pretty strong individual incentive to maintain the attractive tax environment.

Why would they do that ? The light tax they require from those entity still benefits them immensily, because those entity choose to pay them there instead of elsewhere. If Ireland introduced more taxes those big corps would move away, so they would actually receive less...

The definition of a parasitic economy. Other countries are well in their rights to pressure Ireland as hard as they can to end this theft.

You seem to have a very strange definition of theft. Other countries are perfectly entitled to do similarly, as Netherlands does.

Why is there not a focus on countries such as Bermuda here? They are the "tax havens" who make this possible in the first place.

>Why is there not a focus on countries such as Bermuda here? They are the "tax havens" who make this possible in the first place.

There is. Two wrongs don't make a right. The topic at hand is Ireland.

> Other countries are perfectly entitled to do similarly, as Netherlands does.

If every country acted the same way, there would not be a single functioning nation on earth. Their benefits only exist because other countries are losing out, which makes them parasites.

> there would not be a single functioning nation on earth

Holy hyperbole, Batman.

No, it would just mean that there would be a homogeneous corporate tax system, which is what people seem to always argue for.

'Parasites' is also a ridiculous description.

I agree other countries can do what this wish but realistically what's the carrot for Ireland though?

As opppsed to the german economy?

You can't receive less than zero

Income taxes from employees of these megacorps is where Ireland makes the money back.

It's a representative democracy so no not really. We can vote on representatives but then they do whatever they want same as any other democracy.

Representative democracy is a kind of democracy. So yes really.

We can and there is a huge swell of support for Sinn Fein a nationalist left wing party (the political arm of the IRA). The two centre right parties FF & FG (FFG) that have held power since Ireland gained independence are very pro the current taxation policy and have up until now had an iron grip on power due to a culture of voting for whoever your parents voted for. This is slowly changing. Loads of Irish people don't want this. The only problem I see is that we have structured our whole economy around FDI and there are no realistic proposals to revamp our economy to a similar level of wealth through different means. Enough people in Ireland will continue to vote for FFG because they get preferable tax treatment on investments as landlords, backroom deal etc. Ireland is a corrupt mess tbh.

Perhaps they continue to vote for 'FFG' on the grounds that unlike SF, they're not apologists for mass murder and terrorism?

If you think that you don't know very much about recent Irish history. They all have significant blood on their hands, mostly due to their relationship with the Catholic Church.