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In a 1 June article that originally appeared in The New York Times, DNYUZ.com describes the tangled web of tax laws that vary from country to country, which enable multinational media licensing companies to avoid or greatly minimize the taxes they pay on the proceeds of their intellectual properties.
The example cited is that of the manipulations and machinations employed by ViacomCBS, a media giant that owns the rights to TV and film franchises like Spongebob and Transformers. The article claims that, by moving licensing rights from country to country, ViacomCBS has cost the U.S. Treasury some $4 billion in tax revenues that would have been collected on those two properties had the company not taken advantage of such tax loopholes.
ViacomCBS is far from the only multinational company that does this, and such strategies are not illegal. Such exploitation of different countries’ tax laws and tax rates is a common practice, and countries even compete for such companies’ business by lowering their tax rates.
It’s similar to the phenomena for corporations in Joe Biden’s hometown in Delaware and ships using Panamanian registry. The Netherlands is a country that often stands out as offering the most attractive tax rates. Ironically, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs was one of the sources of funding for the study that focused on ViacomCBS’s tax maneuvers, and which also reported that a number of U.S. companies had formed Dutch subsidiaries for tax purposes.
In its defense, the media titan disputes the way its tax dealings have been characterized, saying the study is “deeply flawed and misleading” and it “demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. tax law.” ViacomCBS said,
“ViacomCBS fulfills its tax obligations in all 180-plus countries and the territories we operate, and all of our revenues—including those identified in this report—are fully taxed in relevant jurisdictions around the world, including the United States, as required by applicable law.”
Biden to Change Tax Code
President Biden has proposed a plan that would impede such practices by employing a 15-percent minimum tax on overseas profits for U.S. companies and has asked other countries to agree to standardize that as a global tax rate. Biden also seeks to raise the U.S. corporate tax rate from 21 to 28 percent.
TREND FORECAST: While this article was barely “news for a day,” the entire system across the globe favors the richest at the expense of We the People of Slavelandia. As we have detailed, during the COVID WAR, while the little people with their “non-essential” businesses were forced to close down and other small businesses had to abide by strict draconian rules, for the Bigs, it was business as usual, with barely any restrictions.
Thus, with the billionaires of the world scooping up $8 trillion while hundreds of millions of lives and livelihoods were destroyed, the “Rich Getting Richer” trend will continue to escalate.