Meaningful steps

[john dough]

cbelt3 wrote:
john, fine, go after the obvious manipulators. I don't agree that GE is one of them.. they are an international company with many operations in other countries that sell those products there. And keep in mind, WHERE a company is incorporated has little to do with where it pays taxes. Any US company, regardless of where it's HQ is, pays taxes on its US earnings. And they pay taxes in foreign lands too.

Sure... there's some accounting playing in some firms. And they get caught sometimes too.

Specifically on GE:

"But GE isn't exactly escaping all tax-related pain: The company paid almost $23 billion in taxes to governments around the world from 2000 to 2009, Eisele said."
http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/16/news/com...x_returns/

Here is how Google saved billions:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21...holes.html

"Such income shifting costs the U.S. government as much as $60 billion in annual revenue." (Not all is from Google, but their saving are massive because of these schemes.)

Here is how GE saved billions:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/03/g...risis.html

" After the World Trade Organization forced the United States to halt $5 billion a year in export subsidies to G.E. and other manufacturers, the company’s lawyers and lobbyists became deeply involved in rewriting a portion of the corporate tax code, according to news reports after the 2002 decision and a Congressional staff member.

By the time the measure — the American Jobs Creation Act — was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2004, it contained more than $13 billion a year in tax breaks for corporations, many very beneficial to G.E. One provision allowed companies to defer taxes on overseas profits from leasing planes to airlines. It was so generous — and so tailored to G.E. and a handful of other companies — that staff members on the House Ways and Means Committee publicly complained that G.E. would reap “an overwhelming percentage” of the estimated $100 million in annual tax savings.

According to its 2007 regulatory filing, the company saved more than $1 billion in American taxes because of that law in the three years after it was enacted."

If you think that GE & Google are not shopping to move their presence to another location where they can get the lowest tax rate, then you are just not paying attention. I do not fault them for this; if that were in my best interest, I would do that too.

These companies hire the best lawyers and the sharpest analysts to increase their profits and don't think for a second that these outfits just "got lucky" by landing in places where they "happen" to get the best rates.