Thomas Picketty, the French economist whose blockbuster book on soaring wealth inequalities touched the 2014 zeitgeist, talked to a standing-room-only crowd in Copenhagen last week. Luxembourg under Juncker, he said, operated thus: “They were looking for a new business model, so they stole the tax base of their neighbours.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/19/vestager-tax-inquiry-luxleaks-juncker-eu-pay

Countries that shelter the income of multinationals and very wealthy individuals and others are stealing "the tax base of their neighbours."

How true.

For Americans, that means that working Americans, honest businessmen, especially owners of small businesses that operate strictly in the US, have to share a larger, much larger share of the tax burden than they should. It means that the companies that make the most money in the US can hide their revenue overseas and shelter it from our taxes. What they are really doing is avoiding paying back to our society, to our community what they take from our society and community. They are avoiding their responsibility to their neighbors here in the US.

They are also shifting to honest businesses, honest taxpayers, people on pensions and the children of America the responsibility for their mistakes, for the pollution and environmental degradation that results from their products, from their existence, their sales, their production in the US. Let's say that a company produces a chemical that pollutes our waterways, our lakes and rivers. Theoretically a portion of the profits that company earns from its polluting activities should be paid in taxes -- taxes that can be used not only to enforce regulations that will prevent future damage to our environment but also taxes that can be used to heal the damage that has been done or is being done.

Tax avoidance looks legal. That's only because our lawmakers in enough cases are so corrupt, so on the corporate dole,, that they refuse to pass laws that redefine "legal" to include tax avoidance schemes.

Tax avoidance by big corporations makes it very difficult for smaller competitors to offer good products and competitive prices.

So, while legal from a technical point of view, tax avoidance by big corporations is not healthy for our economy -- it makes it tough on good people and companies with innovative ideas -- and utterly immoral.

What I wonder is why the NSA with its massive surveillance of computer communications does not track and catch tax cheats. They are like terrorists. They are destroying our infrastructure and will eventually destroy our lives -- they just do it slow motion.

What a bunch of irresponsible cads.

>>Tax avoidance looks legal. That's only because our lawmakers in enough cases are so corrupt, so on the corporate dole,, that they refuse to pass laws that redefine "legal" to include tax avoidance schemes.<<

THIS ^^

you leak it anonymously.

*Pepsi, IKEA, AIG, Coach, Deutsche Bank, Abbott Laboratories and nearly 340 other companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg that allowed many of them to slash their global tax bills.

*PricewaterhouseCoopers has helped multinational companies obtain at least 548 tax rulings in Luxembourg from 2002 to 2010. These legal secret deals feature complex financial structures designed to create drastic tax reductions. The rulings provide written assurance that companies’ tax-saving plans will be viewed favorably by Luxembourg authorities.

*Companies have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars through Luxembourg and saved billions of dollars in taxes. Some firms have enjoyed effective tax rates of less than 1 percent on the profits they’ve shuffled into Luxembourg.

*Many of the tax deals exploited international tax mismatches that allowed companies to avoid taxes both in Luxembourg and elsewhere through the use of so-called hybrid loans.

*In many cases Luxembourg subsidiaries handling hundreds of millions of dollars in business maintain little presence and conduct little economic activity in Luxembourg. One popular address – 5, rue Guillaume Kroll – is home to more than 1,600 companies.

*A separate set of documents reported on by ICIJ on Dec. 9 expanded the list of companies seeking tax rulings from Luxembourg to include American entertainment icon The Walt Disney Co., politically controversial Koch industries and 33 other firms. The new files revealed that alongside PwC tax rulings were also brokered by Ernst & Young, Deloitte and KPMG, among other accounting firms.

Link: http://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-leaks/new-leak-reveals-luxembourg-tax-deals-disney-koch-brothers-empire