Border adjustment faces widespread criticism, but finding alternatives proves a tall order
.. Big retailers are lobbying aggressively against the concept, which would tax imports and exempt exports... border adjustment isn’t dead, and that is partly because Republicans haven’t developed palatable alternatives that avoid huge budget deficits or prevent the corporate tax base from fleeing abroad... it would raise an estimated $1 trillion over a decade to help pay for cutting the corporate tax rate to 20% from 35%. Second, border adjustment reshapes the U.S. tax base around domestic consumption, making it harder for companies to escape U.S. taxes by putting their manufacturing, intellectual property or headquarters outside the country... Deep tax cuts face tougher Senate procedural hurdles that would likely require them to expire after 10 years... Charles and David Koch, said Thursday that it is activating a “grassroots army” against border adjustment and targeting Ways and Means members... it cuts rates and matches how other countries tax their companies’ foreign earnings.
The Really Rich Got Richer, According to IRS’s Top 400
Total income reported on the top 400 individual tax returns rose 20% in 2014
.. in a club that required $126.8 million of adjusted gross income to enter. That group, out of nearly 150 million tax returns in 2014, received 1.3% of income and 10% of capital gains that get preferential rates. The same 400 households also made 6.9% of all charitable contributions... The top 400 households paid 2.13% of all individual income taxes, their highest share in the data series that goes back to 1992. Their average tax rate was 23.13%, the highest since 1997, when Congress cut capital-gains taxes... future reports will focus on the top 0.001%, which included 1,396 households for 2014.
Tax Experts Check Out Arguments From Apple Over Ruling
The European Union wants to crack down on the ways that companies minimize their tax bills in Europe, especially in Ireland. In the 1980s, Ireland began modeling itself after Bermuda, a well-known corporate tax haven, said Khadija Sharife, a forensic financial researcher
.. Ireland’s corporate tax rate is 12.5 percent, compared with 35 percent in the United States.
.. The European Commission makes clear, and tax experts agree, that Ireland let Apple determine how much of the income that it generated in the country would be recognized and taxed there.
The rest of Apple’s income that was not recognized and taxed in Ireland could be put in other corporate structures that were effectively stateless. That meant the money in those structures was not taxable anywhere — not even in Ireland — and thus not subject to Ireland’s 12.5 percent tax rate.
While other companies have also had the right to negotiate with Ireland, the commission considers these sorts of loopholes a no-no.
.. Mr. Kleinbard said the commission is not replacing Ireland’s tax law with a view of what the commission thinks should happen. It is simply asking Ireland to enforce the tax rate that it has and close loopholes that allow companies like Apple not to recognize large portions of the income they generate in Ireland and pay even less.
.. It’s true the majority of Apple’s profits are taxed in the United States.
But Ms. De Simone said Apple has also kept more than $200 billion in accumulated profits offshore. That money could someday be brought home and taxed, but Apple is in control of whether or not that actually happens.
..
People would do well to also remember the total amount of government revenue being lost to low-cost tax deals, he said.
“If we allow companies like Apple to pick its tax haven — to place a few thousand employees in a place for a lower tax rate — we do add a few jobs,” he said. “But more widely, the taxes given up globally could be used for public service, worker training and infrastructure repair.”
Why Liberals Love ‘Hillbilly Elegy’
I had zero understanding of how taxes work. I saw about a 28% bite taken out of my paycheck, and didn’t understand that FICA/SS didn’t ultimately go to anybody but me, myself, and I, and that I wasn’t actually paying any income tax. I also had heard of but didn’t really understand or care about things like “every federal tax dollar that leaves SC has three federal tax dollars pass by it coming in.”
.. I naively thought that I was paying for the “welfare” that the tiny, tiny portion of the population “poorer than me” was getting. I was also completely unaware that I was “desperately poor” at all. I was making $6/hr and I thought I was middle class! I knew people who made $10/hr, and I thought they were on the low end of upper class!
.. The more time and resources I had, the more I learned about how the world, and politics, worked, and the more progressive I became.