alwaysthrowaway

You understate how shocking the situation is:

"The U.S. spends more public money on healthcare per capita than Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. In fact, each year the U.S. government spends $4,197 per person, while the OECD median spend is $3,677."

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-spends-more-public-money-o...

US tax system has very few loopholes. Double Irish / Dutch sandwich avoid EU taxes, not US. US tax on foreign income can be deferred - indefinitely - as it is only paid when the money is repatriated. But to truly avoid US corp tax is generally pretty limited (leasing IP from a foreign company etc).

For example: If US company X makes $100B in foreign income in 2017 and repatriates that income in 2019, they will book 0% tax paid in 2017.

Similarly, if X pays income tax to a foreign government they will receive credits for tax already paid - but due to accounting practices the US government will not count the credits when publishing the effective tax rate of X. That last point isn't germane to this particular article but it is something behind many of the 'Look at the low tax rate of X' articles you will see around.

Other posters report that it's due to an accounting change.

Note that many US states have their own corporate income tax levies as well. California charges about 10% I believe.

Thus a corporation domiciled in California is still paying a corp tax rate about as high as any in the world.

"In a state like California, our taxes on rich people and corporations are already about as high as in Germany, its our taxes on people making sub-200k that really dramatically lower. That’s where most of the income is—in the 50-99% range."

It is truly astounding how few people realize this...