I wonder how the USA would fare if every tax eligible citizen did as thorough job at tax avoidance as many multi-nationals that are happy to lobby to keep the status-quo?

Ask Italy, UK, Australia, and many other progressive countries what they think their shifting profits strategy.

Some people may look up to their valid strategy, but they are in fact thieving from the regular citizen who does not have their accounting capability. The government who also equally supports the multinational needs to make up their shortfall, and therefore the regular citizen suffers.

I own plenty of Apple stock, but they are also not citizen friendly in any way.

Haha! First of all, they are tax avoiders, not tax dodgers. Secondly, if you don't like it, why don't you work your way up at Apple and change the company from the inside? Or become a legislator and change the law. See if you can get them to pay whatever version of "fair share" you think they "should." (We all know you won't because, if you did, you wouldn't be using a platform or a device created by companies that don't care about what you think their "fair share" of taxes should be.) But, hey, go ahead and "boycott" Apple and other companies to "protest" their failure to adopt your ideas and definitions of "fair shares." See how far that gets you. I'll continue to buy their products and support them.

And meanwhile, the vilified "millionaires and billionaires" will continue to pay far more in taxes than you ever will (currently 44% of federal taxes while the bottom 45% don't pay anything at all) -- just so we're clear on who contributes little to nothing at all and is merely a consumer/loser.

Congratulations! Your video, David Mitchell on Tax Avoidance (from The Last Leg), has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 4 Badge!

Your video, David Mitchell on Tax Avoidance (from The Last Leg), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

If I remember correctly, the Croatians put everything else on hold when they introduced their system and had their entire staff out in the field for 6 months to enforce it. After that, the system was widely accepted and controls could be tuned down to a normal level.

Greece cannot go down the same route if most of what little bureacracy they have is still in cahoots with the previous nepotic governments. Maybe some third party can provide personnel for a few months...

The €2B come straight from our Tax Avoider in Chief, Juncker. Some say he's more of a federalist, more willing to compromise to keep the EZ together. Doesn't really matter though, Greece is too far down the rabbit hole.

As for Syriza: your guess is as good as mine. If they don't start praying to our Lord Austerity soon, the Troika won't hesitate to let them drown. And if they do get on their knees, Syriza will split and everything's back to square one.

@dannym3141

Broadly speaking, I tend to subscribe to the view that capitalism is the worst economic system anyone ever invented, except for all the others. There are plenty of problems with it but also practical solutions that could be implemented. Pining for a better system is great, but this quasi-vague revolution that Brand is espousing is as almost guaranteed to be as direction-less and short lived as the Occupy movement.

Take campaign finance reform, of what I'm familiar the Mayday PAC in the US is proposing a voucher system where either (1) each voter is given and limited to a set amount tax refund they can spend on campaign contributions or alternatively (2) there is public finance for something like a 10 to 1 matching system for smaller donations. That seems like a good solution to the problem. It's not perfect though, as speech via the media (TV, internet) would still be wielded disproportionately by those with power. But it's a start. More transparency on where donations are coming from would also help.

I'm no fan of inequality either, but it's a far more difficult issue to grapple with. If you approach it with taxes, the problem is you need global coordination. A single country raising taxes will just see incomes shift elsewhere particular the highest percent who are the most mobile. There needs to be some kind of standard on taxation globally as to whether it is incurred where it is earned or where the company is registered, otherwise you have companies like Apple paying next to nothing because they avoid it in both countries (known as the double Irish, although this has now been eliminated it's a good example).

Should investment income be taxed higher? Probably, I'm not too well informed on this subject but it certainly entrenches established wealth. Should there be an estate-like tax of sorts that limits wealth passed on through generations? Perhaps, but it seems like a band-aid of sorts and a double dipping on what should really be collected through income tax in the first place.

I'm all for public services where it makes sense to provide them publicly. I don't like political cronyism either. But solutions need to be practical. Eliminating tax avoidance by multinationals is good policy because otherwise these companies paying virtually no tax intrinsically sets up barriers to entry to smaller competitors which is terrible economically and leads to monopolistic behaviour and higher prices. Targeting finance with a specific tax probably isn't. Business will just shift globally and countries like the UK will lose out more than they gain.

@speechless

UKIP's support from what I've read, comes significantly from smaller country towns with jobs like manufacturing which are disappearing largely due to continued global trade and outsourcing trends. UKIP's popularity comes from being able to scapegoat these global trends on immigration. I was more arguing from the point of view that countering Farage's demagoguery is best done by explaining why it is incorrect rather than necessary pointing to alternative solutions, although that should certainly be part of it. But citing taxing finance as your one and only solution is demagoguery in itself.

I'm not too familiar with the level of tax avoidance and cronyism in UK politics, at least relative to other rich countries. Would a higher personal or corporate tax rate, particularly in finance help? Maybe. As it is, the UK is a finance hub for Europe disproportionate to its economic size and contributes some 16% of GDP and significantly to the trade balance (boosting the pound to improve international buying power).

Finance is very globalized and business could shift very easily to Hong Kong or New York if taxes were raised to a sufficient extent. I would be not be surprised if a higher tax take could be generated from higher tax levels though, however a political overreaction to tax and regulate finance could be just as damaging as focussing on immigration in the greater scale of things.

Some people are saying now that he's said racist things, people are being unfair and using that to detract from the point of Big Government going after the little guy.

I'm worried about that too, that this racism thing will detract from him being proved to be a Welfare Rancher. He was wrong throughout this entire episode and has surrounded himself with fellow ignorant idiots. Now those in the public eye are getting hammered because he says some racist shit? NO they should be hammered because they wrap themselves in the Flag and then support this moron who is wrong on every avenue.

You have to pay your taxes or you're stealing. You have to pay for the raw materials that keep your business going and profitable. You can't just refuse to be a member of the society, benefit from it and sell your wears to it. Then when the government that represents the people goes and tells you to knock it off threaten to "do what's necessary" and get a ton of Militia members to come protect your tax avoiding ass.

I wonder if Wesley Snipes thought "Well I'll just get some brothers with guns and hole up in my house, they'll never do anything!" How fast would 20 black people be killed cause they looked like they were threatening officers?

It wasn't me who first pointed out Simon as a hypocritical "liberal bully."

"Here’s why I assert Simon is a bully. His own words reveal him to be a petty, nasty, mean-spirited guy. “…anything I've ever accomplished as a writer, as somebody doing TV, anything I've ever done in life, down to, like, cleaning up my room, has been accomplished because I was going to show people that they were [bleeped] up, wrong, and that I was the [bleeping] center of the universe and the sooner they got hip to that, the happier they would all be.""

Statist narcissism.

There's as much as you'd like on this. How about...?

"David Simon, a multi-millionaire writer for Time-Warner, one of the largest corporations in the world and a cultural leader, jetted across the globe to speak in front an audience of people with both the financial means and free time about the horrors of “unchecked” capitalism and the tragic loss of the social compact."

"It is rich that a leading light of Hollywood, that of unpaid interns, unmatched inequality of pay, tax-avoidance schemes, exploitation of public subsidies, industry scheming, etc., would criticize a “broken social compact.”"

"Meanwhile, in the real world of unchecked, no-social-compact capitalism, the WSJ is reporting that the “Burger Wars” are expanding to Africa. The heartless capitalist system is stepping in where communism, socialism and other authoritarian systems have failed, bringing with it the digging of new wells, food production systems, jobs, etc. All that awful stuff that comfortable capitalists take for granted."

EDIT: To be clear, I have no specific interest in advocating for Koch, or Simon, or whomever, or in prosecuting them or @radx or anyone else. But I do think this kind of pernicious thinking/bullying can and does spread and causes much harm, even to those engaging in the thinking/bullying, it distorts them in an undesirable way, so I point it out.

In general, when it comes to new technology or scientific breakthroughs, anytime I hear that something will be ready in "just" 5 years, I know it is laughable. If we had actually achieved everything that was predicted to be ready in 5 years, the world would be radically different.

Secondly, this is very effective marketing, but in a subterfuge/propaganda sort of way. Everyone is talking about Amazon, its vision, its radical attempt to change the way things are delivered, etc. just in time for the holiday shopping season. What more could a brand want?

But what are we not talking about? Amazon's work conditions for and treatment of its seasonal workers (of which my aunt and uncle are two) and Amazon's business model being built upon a shell game of tax avoidance.

Amazon is waving some shiny new thing in your face that will never come to fruition so that you don't open your eyes to what they are really doing right now.

From Wikipedia:

In June 2012, Carr's involvement in an alleged K2 tax avoidance scheme came to light after an investigation by The Times newspaper. The scheme is understood to involve UK earners "quitting" their job and signing new employment contracts with offshore shell companies based in the tax haven of Jersey.

Earlier in 2012 Carr had lampooned people who avoid tax during the second series of Channel 4's satirical news programme 10 O'Clock Live. A sketch from the show, in which he poked fun at the 1 per cent tax rate of Barclays Bank has now "come back to haunt him".

^gtjwkq

I find myself wondering why you keep saying "left-wingers" all the time. There are more than just two opposed schools of political thought.

I'm afraid as recent events have demonstrably proven we do need regulation of markets. There is no such thing as a perfect market but there are things such as greed, corruption and incompetence. Sometimes the profit incentive will activate all those qualities and more.

I'm still astounded that loss-making banks, in the very business of capital, are still awarding bonuses to executives who have failed miserably to make a penny. And after taking billions of tax-payers money to fucking recapitalise.

And that's money I would indeed be happy to help the unfortunates in society. The lost potential of humanity is a big price to pay. To not help because somehow one could say there are no guarantees of success is to avoid the moral argument. Do we choose to help each other or not? Or do we just see ourselves as the haves and have-nots?

So to Rougy's comment that "Capitalism is the absolute best at one thing: making rich people richer at the expense of everybody else."
Well you only have to open your paper to see the ugly truth. Take Tesco one of the world's biggest retailers. Their finance arm has a three year £225m debt guaranteed under favourable terms, something they negotiated on the heels of the main banking collapse - they certainly didn't need the deal. They're also heavily into tax avoidance like most banks and now the taxpayer guarantees their borrowings. What a marvellously efficient exchange of goods and services.

Over at Barclays high street staff have had their pensions cut while the company's investment bankers are in line for average pay of £200,000. Yep, no surplus value there.

Studies that focus on the effect of tax cuts on the economy point toward job creation, higher wages, and an increase in revenue. The fact that the economy is experiencing a downturn cannot be linked to the Bush Tax Cuts. The slide is due to other problems. I'm pulling from multiple sources so I'll help you out by quoting those studies HERE, so you don't have to read all day (just half a day).

What does the following article tell you (cited by Lori Robertson, author of the Fact Check article you linked to)?

"History demonstrates that lower tax rates are good for the economy. The tax rate reductions in the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980s all resulted in faster growth, rising incomes, and more job creation. Moreover, even though critics complained that these tax rate reductions would allow the "rich" to keep too much of their money, upper-income taxpayers actually wound up paying a greater share of the tax burden during all three decades, because lower rates reduced the incentive to hide, shelter, and underreport income."
Heritage.org

Obama knows that he shouldn't be raising taxes.

"Democrat Barack Obama says he would delay rescinding President Bush's tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy."
The Huffington Post

Lowering taxes for the big earners means freeing up more capital in the private sector. THAT'S A GOOD THING! Raising taxes obviously has the opposite effect.

"The higher the bracket, the greater the penalty. By the time taxpayers reach the 39.6 percent bracket, they are able to keep only about 60 cents of any added income--and this is counting only the federal individual income tax. This high tax "price" of government has adverse effects on work effort, but most of the economic damage occurs because punitive tax rates discourage saving and investment. Indeed, because upper-bracket taxpayers earn most of their income by supplying capital to the market, and because capital is extremely sensitive to changes in tax rates, this is one of the most important reasons to reduce the top tax rate.

More specifically, high tax rates encourage upper-income taxpayers to alter the location, timing, and composition of their portfolios to protect their income. This misallocation of savings and investment reduces the economy's growth rate and deprives workers of the capital they need to be more productive; and this lower productivity means, of course, that workers will earn less income."

-Daniel J. Mitchell, Ph.D.
Heritage.org

Just read the Joint Economic Committee's studies on Tax Rates VS. Tax Revenues:

"The 1993 Clinton tax increase appears to having the opposite effect on the willingness of wealthy taxpayers to expose income to taxation. According to IRS data, the income generated by the top one percent of income earners actually declined in 1993. This decline is especially significant since the retroactivity of the Clinton tax increase in that year limited the ability of taxpayers to deploy tax avoidance strategies, temporarily resulting in an increase in their tax burden."
House Joint Economic Committee Report April 1996

In response to the Rolling Stone article you presented:

"Referring to the chart on page 5 of the census report, we see that the top of the lowest fifth bracket went from $13,471 in 1967 to $16,116 in 1998, a growth of 19.6% in real terms. During the same time, the top fifth of wage earners went from a minimum of $53,170 in 1967 to $75,000 in 1998, a growth of 41.1%. Similar increases can be observed in each of the income brackets.

Everyone got richer, but the rich got richer faster.

This is hardly surprising. Someone that is rich is going to have more extra money that they can invest which, in turn, creates more money. Money generates money and no-one disputes that being rich is, by definition, a financial advantage in a capitalistic society. Short of draconian wealth redistribution, this will always be the case. However, the macro-economic data from 1967 to 1998 does not support the assertion that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The data supports the position that everyone got richer. While there may be year to year variations in a negative direction, the long-term trend is that all Americans are getting richer."
Letxa.com

From the same article:

"Saying that "a tax cut favors the rich" is either based on ignorance (given that you can only give a tax cut to someone that pays taxes, and that the "rich" are really the only ones that pay taxes in any substantial manner) or is disingenous (because the person knows this to be true, but makes the accusation anyway). The statement "a tax cut favors the rich" should be reworded "a tax cut favors those that pay taxes." It would be just as accurate but obviously without the class warfare undertones. Unfortunately, those that state "tax cuts favor the rich" are usually hoping for those class warefare undertones, so hoping for them to use the more accurate and less divisive words is probably utopian."
Letxa.com

...but what do Barack Obama, The Heritage Foundation, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Joint Economic Committee know?