In the wake of the 2020 Presidential Election Campaign, Bernie Sanders unveiled his idea of wealth tax. The veteran senator called “Billionaires shouldn’t exist..” last week in Washington. He embraced this idea by theorizing tax reforms and its method of accumulation.
OECD again challenges this form of wealth inequality. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development announced its manifesto regarding the tax reforms on Wednesday. It’s not showing the picture good enough for Silicon Valley tech giants.
They reported that tech companies like Google and Facebook filed a lot of their assets and profits in low tax countries like Ireland, instead of the country where their business resides.
The OECD head of tax policy Pascal Saint-Amans told the journalists, “The current system is under stress and cant survive if we don’t remove the tensions”.
The growth of the profits of influential internet companies, like Google and Facebook, has prompted wealth-tax experts to ponder on the current taxation system, which is descended from the 1920’s tax ordinance.
“The current system is under stress and cant survive if we don’t remove the tensions” – PASCAL SAINT-AMANS
Silicon Valley technologists have earned many benefits over the past few decades, but the tax-free boon from the qualified business stock is serving as a recruiting tool for some companies.
For many Silicon Valley employees, that started the five-year clock on holding shares in the stock market. The first people occupying the 100 percent election were given the advantage to take tax break when they filed their returns in 2016. Generally, it takes the I.R.S., Internal Revenue Service, three years to audit returns. Yet when tax provisions are imprecise and vague, tax advisers for companies often see an opportunity to avail from the loophole.
France mainly shows deep concern over digital tax regulation. They introduced the 3 percent digital service tax on french sales for 30 internet companies. This decision causes serious outrage from US-based companies & American president Donald Trump jumped into it by ordering the probe.
The United Kingdom proposed a similar digital service tax by levying a 2 percent tax and claiming it a step to bracket the digital companies into the tax-net who are virtually paying nothing.
In response to Senator Bernie’s stance, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook remarked,
“On some level, no one deserves to have that much money.”
Chairman of Federal Trade Commission, Joe Simon, who once approved Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 sounded a warning bell by saying, “we will break you up if we have to”, earlier this year.
Facebook declined to rebut Simon’s remarks when contacted, according to Business Insider.
Featured image: Steve Proehl/Getty
