How Google reduces its tax bill by US$3.1Billion

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

It also has the unfortunate effect of putting pressure on all governments to lower tax rates on corporate income to stay competitive and to increasingly shift the tax burden to working-class and middle-class taxpayers who are not mobile.

You're absolutely right.



You're witnessing a multigenerational theft and transfer of wealth on a massive scale. While people argue about the puppet show called politics, and thinking that one side is going to offer anything different than the other, the real forces at work are laughing all the way to the bank about how they've played people for such stooges.

An excerpt from Matt Taibbi's new book Griftopia:

Here’s yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market. Lukens has no say in this; he pays what he has to pay. Some of that money of his goes into the pockets of the banks that disenfranchise him politically, and the rest of it goes increasingly into the pockets of Middle Eastern oil companies. And since he’s making less money now, Lukens is paying less in taxes to the state of Pennsylvania, leaving the state in a budget shortfall. Next thing you know, Governor Ed Rendell is traveling to the Middle East, trying to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the same oil states who’ve been pocketing Bob Lukens’s gas dollars. It’s an almost frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation.