Who Pays Taxes?

Tonight is the last time you have to get your taxes done. Yes tax returns are due on the 15^th. That is still not enough time to screw it up and feel threatened that you could go to jail for not participating in essentially the government’s go fund me pages. So where does all our tax money go? Two years ago President Trump signed a Tax Reform Bill and made some clear promises that the “ordinary” people would benefit from it. Wrong. Lies again.

The biggest tax breaks are going to large corporations. The tax on companies’ profits were reduced greatly from 35% to 21%. Most large companies didn’t even pay anywhere close to the high rate in fact some companies like General Electric didn’t pay ANY Federal Taxes in   2010. If I didn’t pay my Federal Taxes I would be rotting in jail now. In fact 18 of corporations paid no income tax at all. Most companies will go through great lengths to avoid paying corporate taxes. They do this by moving their corporate addresses to off shore locations. They will go to the Cayman Islands or to Panama. This tax avoidance is a common thing to do. It was revealed during the 2012 elections that candidate Mitt Romney had companies headquartered in the Cayman Islands. That cheat is now a Senator. Go Figure!

Avoid taxes by registering your company in one of these 0 tax or low tax countries. Luxembourg, Netherlands, Bermuda, Ireland, Singapore and Switzerland. It is easy to move your profits off shore. Pharmaceutical companies and Google avoid paying the 35% if they list their inventions in America to shift their patents, pill formulas and LOGOs from their United States bases to their outposts in foreign countries. Today a company can move all of their assets just on paper alone. Even Coca Cola can simply take their hidden recipe out of America and put it in a Swiss vault and it is a Swiss company secret. It is happening all the time and Trump is basically encouraging the practice.

Apple for years has been avoiding paying taxes on foreign profits. They keep their foreign money overseas and don’t bring it back to America. In 2017 alone they made $269 billion dollars outside the United States and kept the money out of the country to avoid paying taxes. They keep their stash of money in Ireland. When Ireland said they would increase their taxes, Apple moved their billions of dollars to an address in Jersey. No, Not New Jersey but a small island tax haven in the English Channel. Google packs their money and seems to move it all over the globe. First Google licensed some of its intellectual property in Mountain View, California then moved it to a subsidiary in Dublin, Ireland where their overseas profits don’t even get taxed there. Google funnels their profits to the Netherlands and finally to Bermuda where the corporate tax rate is ZERO.

The corporate CEO’s will say that they pay their taxes in every jurisdiction but what they don’t tell you is that they register their taxable income in places around the world that do  not charge any corporate taxes.  Does being a success in business means being a slithery snake? Yes!

The good news is that Trump’s Bill will now make American companies pay taxes on their overseas profits but the rate is so low ranging from 8% to 15% in some cases that companies will still be very wealthy. No one can make these companies who bring their profits back to America give more money to their American workers. In 2004 Bush tried the American Jobs Creation Act that required large corporations to bring back home their overseas profit money at just a 5% tax break for one year in the hopes of creating more jobs here and that failed too. There is NO reason to believe that Trump’s Tax breaks to corporations will trickle down to higher wages because they simply don’t have to .