Shocking new report: Companies dodge taxes, and water is wet

Interesting wrinkle, and one that I don’t know how to deal with properly. I believe we have some interesting laws barring media from certain levels of foreign ownership, right? But do we also have laws barring foreign entities from certain levels of advertising? Should we? And what determines when an entity is foreign? Should Apple be considered part Eg Chinese due to the manufacturing alliances? Even though I am fairly absolutist when it comes to free speech, I could get along with limiting the speech of foreigners in theory, but it’s harder to imagine how to do it in practice.

 

Here is a more comprehensive and representative before and after. Effective rates went from 16% to 9%.

To understand why these numbers look low they are looking at US taxes divided by total global profits. Something like close to half of large US company revenue comes from overseas. Companies may or may not pay international taxes on those foreign earnings. The data went to 2022. In 2023 there was a global minimum tax passed as part of the IRA so the numbers may have gone up, but I think there was a lot of confusion on how to implement the new global tax.