‘Loophole’ is such great branding. Loopholes don’t exist - there are only ‘laws.’ Flawed laws are rebranded as loopholes. Similar to pharma’s invention of ‘side effects.’ There‘s no such thing as a side effect - there are only effects. Bad effects are rebranded as side effects.
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Granted that there often is a difference between what's moral and what's legal, it seems quite reasonable that many people's morality suggests companies should pay more than the legal minimum.
I hear that. What I'm wondering is that if people are going to judge companies by a moral standard for taxes (above and beyond legal minimum), how would they go about designing a framework for determining what's moral and what isn't?
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When people say "Amazon should pay more tax" I don't take them to mean "Amazon should electively pay more than required by law" I take them to mean "our laws should require Amazon to pay more tax."
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I take it as just lashing out, unless people really are suggesting to either tax corporations on something other than profitability, or eliminate carryforward losses - both of which seem unlikely.
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Great question! But I've got to disappear to an early dinner. I guess my intuition is: individual ethics is fantastically difficult and complicated; it seems likely the same for a type of collective ethics applicable to companies. I'd happily read a good book on it...
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Glad we had a productive conversation - enjoy dinner.
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Yeah it seems to me that moral==legal when it comes to taxes, with considerations: (1) Companies lobby to change what's legal, and they could ask for things that are immoral (like skirting paying fees for damage they caused); (2) The law could be immoral, obv.
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I think there's an implicit "don't push tax minimization to a comical extreme" too. Skip the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich even if it's technically legal.
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