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How to avoid paying taxes and save billions

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mouser:
Tired of living by the normal rules? Just become a giant corporation!  All of you people who are just living life as normal humans are suckers.

Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes.. Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-shows-how-60-billion-u-s-revenue-lost-to-tax-loopholes.html

Renegade:
Google is “flying a banner of doing no evil, and then they’re perpetrating evil under our noses,” said Abraham J. Briloff, a professor emeritus of accounting at Baruch College in New York who has examined Google’s tax disclosures.
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Well, if you set up the rules of the game that way, and people take advantage of it, can you really blame them?

On a related topic, if you are a US citizen, there is no hope in Hell for you to get around tax. You must have a company set up. The US expects all income from all sources worldwide to be declared in excess of $75,000 (or something like that). So, if you live overseas, you still need to pay Uncle Sam. Corporations do not need to pay Uncle Sam, but private citizens do.

Now, is that messed up or what? I don't need to rant about it. I'll leave the ranting to some of the Americans here. :D

Deozaan:
We definitely need taxes to be simple. Something incredibly simple and stupid such as 10% for EVERYONE would make it so easy to make sure everyone and everything paid properly.

But that's coming from someone who doesn't know much about how the tax system works.

Renegade:
We definitely need taxes to be simple. Something incredibly simple and stupid such as 10% for EVERYONE would make it so easy to make sure everyone and everything paid properly.

But that's coming from someone who doesn't know much about how the tax system works.
-Deozaan (October 21, 2010, 08:03 PM)
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While a flat 10% is probably too simple, I think you're right. I would further extend the need for simplicity to laws and regulations as well.

At the moment laws are so complicated that I truly believe ignorance of the law IS an excuse. There are simply too many laws and they are too complex. It is completely unreasonable to expect people to know and follow them all. Similarly for the tax system, it's just too complex for anyone to reasonably follow. When only corporations with armies of lawyers and accountants are able to benefit from tax laws, there's a serious systemic problem.

Perry Mowbray:
I don't know if you followed Australia's implementation of a GST a couple of years ago? It was marketed as a GoodSimpleTax, but it turned into a huge fiasco.

The issues that Australia bumped into were about trying to balance the Good and the Simple with the Equitable.

A flat 10% is not equitable as the people with more money have greater responsability and should be contributing more, and what the poor have often doesn't cover their needs.

The cries for Tax Reform often come from the nouveau riche and the people who have some money and want more. There was a very interesting book published in England recently that analysed various contries statistics and determined that the greater disparity between the rich and the poor, or the haves and the have-nots, leads to an unhealthy society.

A groundbreaking work on the root cause of our ills, which is changing the way politicians think. Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Greeks? The answer: inequality. This groundbreaking book, based on years of research, provides hard evidence to show how almost everything—-from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy-—is affected not by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is. Urgent, provocative and genuinely uplifting, The Spirit Level has been heralded as providing a new way of thinking about ourselves and our communities, and could change the way you see the world
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The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

Company Tax is something a bit different, as they give back to society in different ways and although it's not a "tax" providing employment, necessary services and other benefits, and it would be difficult to account for all of those things. Which is why that book is interesting as it looks at the end result to measure the inputs rather than trying to measure the inputs themselves...

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