The big American tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of paying almost $278bn (£211bn) less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for US companies making the same profits.
Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft generated $11tn of revenue and $2.5tn of profits over the past 10 years.
Yet they paid an average 18.8% in combined national and federal corporation taxes, compared with an average 29.7% in the US, according to the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF), which said the Silicon Six had “hardwired” tax avoidance into their business models.
Analysis by the not-for-profit organisation found that if one-off repatriation tax payments in the US connected to historical tax avoidance were excluded, the average corporate income tax contribution of the six firms fell to 16.1% over the past decade.
I would have to work for 514 million years to earn what one of the silicone six avoided paying in taxes.
Eat them.
I don’t think that’s any where close enough.
But they’ll audit the people making less than 200k because they can’t afford to hire lawyers to effectively fight back.
Biden had hired up IRS agents specifically to go after these people and companies. Trump fired them all so the IRS is gonna have to go after the poors.
USA 💪
Now do their CEOs …
Well, no fucking shit.
Call Elon and his DOGE muskrats. They’ll fix it!
Their whole job is to make sure you don’t notice shit like this and instead focus on chaos they’re creating for small fish
Wow, I’d say that’s unbelievable but it is completely believable. Those sums of money are really beyond my comprehension though
A Billion here and a Billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.
…that’s IT?! These fuckers should be paying BILLIONS MORE.
Make them pay double.
Go back and add inflation and interest over the last decade… then fine them for not paying their responsible share, when it was due, to deter future violation and prevent other companies from doing the same.
Oscar: Listen, I would love to have an honest conversation with management about ethics. Why isn’t the company doing better? Mmm… it could be the pad of Post-its I took home last week. Or it could be the twelve million dollars in deferred compensation in stock options they paid the CEO for a year of substandard performance. I’m sure we’ll cover both in the seminar.
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Boycott and talk to others around you as to why you are boycotting.
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Create fake amazing resumes, apply for high-level jobs at Starbucks, Amazon, etc.
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Waste their time with interviews, then bail out. Tell them you changed your mind because they have a toxic reputation.
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If you already work for one of these corporations, sabotage their operations. There’s manuals out there on how to conduct sabotage, but it can be as simple as relaying the wrong day or time for meetings to waste everyone’s time, or finding things that are not exactly according to policy and making a big deal about the importance of following policy to the letter, etc.
A few pointers: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
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TFW when it’s called the ‘Silicon Six’ but Intel isn’t even on the list
I reckon they wanted something that sounded like “the Sinister Six” for maximum headline clickbaitiness
I mean, Silicon Seven is right there and preserves the allitteration…
Unless it’s about six sounding like sex or something stupid like that, I agree that there’s no reason to exclude the “grande dame” of Silicon Valley fuckery…
Why is Microsoft on that list?
So are they alleging fraud? The article seems to be making the companies out to be the bad guys, but it sounds more like the governments writing tax code to encourage this.
You’re arguing as if tax cuts and loopholes in the tax code are ok, but they’re not. Just look at what Reagan did and tell me it’s all good.
The first tax cut (Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981) among other things, cut the highest personal income tax rate from 70% to 50% and the lowest from 14% to 11% and decreased the highest capital gains tax rate from 28% to 20%.
The second tax cut (Tax Reform Act of 1986) among other things, cut the highest personal income tax rate from 50% to 38.5% but decreasing to 28% in the following years and increased the highest capital gains tax rate from 20% to 28%.
I’m not saying it’s okay, I’m saying we shouldn’t be expecting companies to act ethically. They will avoid as much tax as possible, so we should focus on lobbying governments to change the tax law to reduce avoidance and increase tax liability.
Well put.
We should be demanding they act ethically. The hell the rules should be different for them than for us.
We can demand anything we want. The reality is that’s never going to happen. Want a change? Change the laws. Make it so they can’t do it.
Good luck with that though. The government is screwed at this point.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you have a strange set of values. You have incredibly greedy companies mostly owned by incredibly greedy billionaires who are doing their best to take every single penny they possibly can, and according to you that’s not bad.
Or, to put it another way, you wrote that the government tax code encourages this. What section of the tax code asks billionaires to take as much of our money as possible? Where is that written? What paragraph says, steal their money, go do it, it’s good!?
