Great Reasons to Entirely Get Rid of the Income Tax, #1
Microsoft, Bill Gates’ company that everyone loves to hate, lightens its tax bill in all the ways that are legal and available to corporations. They’d be idiots not to and stockholders would quite reasonably and correctly complain.
Their latest entirely legal modus operandi has to do with offshoring intellectual property, a neat trick. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft axed more than $500 million from its annual tax bill by putting a small subsidiary in Dublin (Ireland, not Ohio) in charge of $16 billion of its intellectual assets. Thus, income from all this great stuff they invented in America is realized in Ireland. The land of potato-famines-past has made of itself the healthiest economy in Europe by creating the Emerald Tax Haven.
The Emerald Isle just wasn’t working as a business plan.
Well, I say good-on for the Irish. It’s about time that much-abused island nation came into its own and, amazingly, they have done it in the cutting-edge world of computer science and ap…