They are. The US taxes companies on profits made abroad. The issue is that these taxes are only collected when the money enters th US, so companies park this money abroad.
Or they wait for good deals to come up to bring the funds back home at a fraction of the cost.
Meanwhile it's easy to get domestic loans based on foreign assets which gives them easy access to spend that same money locally.
Put it in safe low yield securities on the other side, take out low interest loans here and profit on the tax money which should have been paid at the expense of small competitors who don't have the scale for tax scams or the lobbyists to legalize them.
They still pay taxes, though, even if politicians did set a lower rate for a period of time. If they bring the money back in to pay back the loans they'll pay taxes on it.
You call this a "scam" when in reality it's the system working as designed, so I don't think you have a particularly good grasp on this subject. Again, in most countries companies don't pay taxes on foreign income at all.
Things are indeed working as designed, designed by the people who it benefits through regulatory capture, lobbying, and campaign finance, that part shouldn't be hard to understand.
If it were "working as designed" there wouldn't be a trend of global cooperation in closing these tax loopholes and you wouldn't be reading an article about France working to close one.
>If they bring the money back in to pay back the loans they'll pay taxes on it.
While profiting from the capital which should have been paid in taxes for decades, and more importantly out competing their smaller rivals out of the market because they didn't have the resources, scope, or moral infortitude to engage in similar behaviors.
Would that it were we all could avoid our financial obligations and paying our fair share long as we did so eventually while being called heroic.
> Would that it were we all could avoid our financial obligations and paying our fair share long as we did so eventually while being called heroic.
Again, most countries - including most European countries - don't Levy taxes on foreign company earnings at all. If Google were not a US company, they wouldn't be taxed on any foreign earnings even without any kind of money parking abroad.
> If I lived in Nevada instead of California I wouldn't have to pay state income tax so by your logic I should just stop paying?
No, my point is that Californians shouldn't point to Nevada and say they're not paying their fair share of taxes.
Google isn't dodging any French taxes, and isn't dodging American taxes either. What people are complaining about is the fact that American companies' foreign earnings aren't taxes until those earnings are brought into the country. This is not against the law, since companies aren't forced to move that money back into the country. And to put the cherry on top, most countries don't tax companies on foreign earnings at all.
So France is trying to say that they are being disadvantaged because these companies are delaying payment of American taxes, on earnings that wouldn't be taxed at all in France or most other European countries. This is blatant hypocrisy. France is complaining that American isn collecting taxes too slowly on earnings that it and it's peers don't tax at all. If European countries think corporations should pay taxes on foreign earnings, maybe they should begin with taxing their own corporations' foreign earnings first.
They don't have to "spend" it. They invest the money. Then the investment vehicle uses the money (now not directly tied to the foreign earning) to fund projects anywhere around the world. (For example in the US too.)
They can't move it into a US bank without paying taxes on it.
They can do convoluted accounting with loans and subsidiaries and the like to bring it into the country anyway with the unwinding and tax paying left into the far future.
