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Speaker 1

00:00

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Taxes. Essentially, the government's GoFundMe page. Now, today is April 15th, which means you have just 45 minutes to file your taxes. Except, relax, Don't panic, because thanks to the weekend and a holiday, the deadline is actually April 17th this year, except don't relax, do panic, that's still not enough time to do it right.

Speaker 1

00:23

You're fucked, you're absolutely fucked, and you're going to jail, Anthony. -♪ ♪ -♪ Many people are perplexed and mystified by our tax system, perhaps best exemplified by this Instagram video from Cardi B.

Speaker 2

00:35

You know the government is taking 40% of my taxes, and Uncle Sam, I want to know what you're doing with my fucking tax money. What is y'all niggas doing with my fucking money? What is y'all doing with my fucking money?

Speaker 2

00:49

I want to know. I want receipts. I want everything. I want to know what that nigga's doing with my fucking money.

Speaker 2

00:54

What is that nigga doing with my fucking money? Uncle Sam, I want to know what the fuck he's doing with my motherfucking money.

Speaker 1

00:59

Well, well, Cardi, if you really want to know where your money's going, mate, I present to you the recently passed Omnibus Spending Package!

Speaker 3

01:08

Whoo! -♪ Whoo! -♪ -♪ Yeah,

Speaker 1

01:10

yeah, yeah, yeah! Because, it turns out, Cardi, your fucking money goes to your fucking military, your fucking healthcare, and your fucking Social Security and veteran and unemployment benefits. Everything else is just some fucking discretionary shit, and of course, interest.

Speaker 1

01:24

Now, as you may recall, late last year, Republicans passed and Donald Trump signed a tax reform bill. And in selling it, Trump made some clear promises about who stood to benefit.

Speaker 4

01:34

Our focus is on helping the folks who work in the mailrooms and the machine shops of America, the plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe fitters, the people that like me best.

Speaker 1

01:48

Well, that is clearly nonsense, because if this bill were really helping the people that like Donald Trump best, it would exclusively benefit Eric Trump, Roseanne Barr, and anyone who's ever looked both ways before whispering, it was the Jews. And the truth is, for all Trump's talk of pipefitters, the biggest tax rate cut by far actually goes to businesses. With the top federal corporate tax rate, the tax on a company's profits going from 35% to just 21%.

Speaker 1

02:19

And to be fair, many policy makers on both sides had argued that the 35% federal rate, among the highest in the world, should actually come down. But to be even fairer, most companies didn't pay 35%. In fact, before the bill was signed, the effective rate, the amount companies actually paid, was closer to 24 percent. And some large companies have historically paid far less than that.

Speaker 1

02:40

You may remember a few years ago, people were furious about this.

Speaker 5

02:44

GE had profits of $14.2 billion in 2010. 5000000000 dollars of that made in the United States. But the company's expected U.S.

Speaker 5

02:54

Tax bill? A grand total of 0 dollars.

Speaker 1

02:58

Okay, so when the total is 0, you can't call it a grand total. There is literally no total less grand, except maybe total cereal. And that's just because it tastes like your spoon somehow missed the cereal and now you're just eating the box that it came in.

Speaker 1

03:15

And G.E. May well say, well, hold on, that's just 1 year. But a recent study found that between 2008 and 2015, 18 large profitable companies, including General Electric, paid no federal income tax at all over the entire period. None at all.

Speaker 1

03:32

And that is a staggering total. Which is incidentally what they used to call total with raisins, until they got more honest and changed it to total with raisins, but who gives a shit? So, tonight, in honor of upcoming tax day, We thought we'd give you just a glimpse of the lengths that companies will go to to legally avoid taxes, both here and abroad. Now, corporate tax avoidance has a long and infuriatingly proud history.

Speaker 1

03:55

In the 1980s, for instance, a lawyer named John Carroll Jr. Came up with a tactic to move U.S. Companies offshore to avoid taxes. And his firm celebrated him with, and this is true, a 13-minute operetta staged in his New York apartment.

Speaker 1

04:09

And I'll give you just a very small taste. ♪

Speaker 3

04:12

The fans will be screaming But you can't be believing I can never be taxed again

Speaker 1

04:19

♪ Wow! We may have just found the only musical resistant to race-blind casting. You can't go Hamilton on this 1, because those people really have to be white.

Speaker 1

04:34

Now, the tax dodge being celebrated there involved taking an American company and headquartering it in Panama, where taxes were lower. Something its creator called the Panama Scoot, which sounds like the name of a tiny elf in a cowboy hat. Howdy there! My name's Panama Scoot, and I sleep in your boot!

Speaker 1

04:52

-... And offshore scooting is actually something of a common theme in corporate tax avoidance. For decades, companies have hunted for ways to get their money to friendlier tax havens like the Cayman Islands. You may remember that during the 2012 election, it emerged that Mitt Romney had money in the, in companies in the Caymans, which led to this magnificent clip of John Stossel saying the 1 thing he probably shouldn't be saying to the person he's speaking to.

Speaker 4

05:17

Mitt Romney pays taxes and all the money earned from the Cayman entities.

Speaker 6

05:23

I would think it would be like pirate heaven. Some pirate would go and steal all the money. Oh!

Speaker 1

05:29

0, Come on, Stossel! Come on! You can't say the word pirate to a guy with an eye patch.

Speaker 1

05:37

You can't! It's not fair! It's like me sitting down across from you and calling you bootleg Geraldo. Yes, yes, It's obvious, but it's also lazy and hurtful.

Speaker 1

05:47

That's an indoor thought. -♪ ♪ -♪ And tax havens have become magnets to corporations who try and shift as much of their profits there as possible. It's a major reason why, in 2016, nearly two-thirds of the profits made by American multinationals outside the U.S. Were booked in just 6 low or 0 tax countries.

Speaker 1

06:06

And it's a lot easier to move profits offshore than you might think.

Speaker 7

06:10

An increasingly popular way, particularly pharmaceutical and high-tech companies like Google, avoid paying the 35 percent, is to shift their patents, computer code, pill formulas, even logos from their U.S. Bases to their outposts in low-tax countries.

Speaker 8

06:27

Today a company can move predominantly all of its assets just on paper.

Speaker 7

06:33

You can push a button and move your algorithms...

Speaker 8

06:37

Or Coca-Cola could take the recipe out of the vault... -...and put it in a Swiss vault.

Speaker 7

06:41

-...and then it's Swiss. Yeah.

Speaker 1

06:44

Yeah. Coke could put their recipe in a Swiss vault and their profits would move offshore. That is very roughly how it works. Although, for the record, just being in a Swiss vault doesn't automatically make something Swiss.

Speaker 1

06:56

That's why we don't call this Swiss gold, we call it Nazi gold. Those are Hitler bucks, you Swiss fucks. And this happens all the time. And the best innovators in Weasley accounting have arguably been tech companies.

Speaker 1

07:10

Look at Apple. For years, they've been deferring paying U.S. Taxes on foreign profits by stashing the money overseas and not bringing it back. So much so that at the end of last year, they had 269 billion dollars parked overseas.

Speaker 1

07:23

And when their CEO Tim Cook appeared in front of Congress a few years back, he was very defensive about that.

Speaker 9

07:29

We pay all the taxes we owe, every single dollar. We don't move intellectual property offshore and use it to sell our products back to the United States to avoid taxes. We don't stash money on some Caribbean island.

Speaker 1

07:45

Now, he was technically correct there, because Apple didn't stash their money on a Caribbean island. They did, however, have it stashed on this island, Ireland. Which is, it is true, not in the Caribbean.

Speaker 1

07:59

So, 1 word made a lot of difference there. It's like if somebody said, the 1 thing I can promise you is that this refrigerator is absolutely not full of severed Caribbean heads. Maybe that is technically true, but I'm still gonna pass on the sparkling water. And when Ireland indicated that it planned to change its tax laws, Apple found a new shelter for profits on this island, the Isle of Jersey, a tax haven in the English Channel, which is again, not technically in the Caribbean.

Speaker 1

08:26

Although, when you really look at it, you could almost mistake it for the Caribbean If you squint a little, drink 9 pints of beer and hold a picture of the Caribbean in front of it. Now, meanwhile, Google used a slightly different tax workaround, sending its money on something of a world tour.

Speaker 10

08:42

Google licensed some of the intellectual property it created here in the U.S. To a subsidiary in Ireland. But it turns out Google's overseas profits don't even get taxed there, because Google then reportedly funnels those profits through the Netherlands, and then to, of all places, Bermuda, where the corporate tax rate is 0.

Speaker 1

09:02

Now, that tax trick actually has a name. It's called the double Irish with a Dutch sandwich. Which sounds like a disgusting sex act, or an even more disgusting Waffle House menu item.

Speaker 1

09:15

It's when someone opens up a baked potato, farts in it, and closes it again really quick. That's what it is. That is exactly what it is. And when Google's CFO was asked about their tax policies at a conference, his answer nearly got him laughed off the stage.

Speaker 11

09:31

We pay all our taxes in every jurisdiction

Speaker 12

09:34

to the full extent that the law allows us. And that's what

Speaker 11

09:38

we do. We pay every penny of tax we owe to everybody, everywhere.

Speaker 1

09:43

Okay. The reaction to the sentence, I pay all my taxes, Should never be incredulous laughter, unless you are a very wealthy dog who's just spoken for the first time. And here is where I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Trump's tax bill actually forces companies to pay taxes on all the money they've stashed overseas.

Speaker 1

10:02

The hope is that they'll then bring it home in something called repatriation. The bad news is, the tax they've been forced to pay, which may have once been 35 percent, remember, has been slashed to as little as 8 to 15 percent. Which seems less like a punishment, and a lot more like actively rewarding companies for tax avoidance. But Steve Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary, an objectively good-looking man, argued that this would be a huge benefit to America's workers.

Speaker 13

10:30

We will have a one-time tax on overseas profits, which will bring back trillions of dollars that are offshore to be invested here in the United States to purchase capital and to create jobs.

Speaker 1

10:45

Now, I know it was hard to pay attention to what he was saying, because you were just automatically undressing the guy with your eyes, and you do it whenever he opens his mouth. Am I right? I'm definitely right.

Speaker 1

10:54

The guy's a California 10. He's a smoke show. But what he's saying there is, Giving these companies a break on the taxes they owe is worth it because it will lead to job creation. And that is hard to completely disprove because anything theoretically could lead to jobs.

Speaker 1

11:11

You can say, I'm dipping this badger in fudge to create jobs, And I can't prove that you won't create any jobs by doing that, but I would argue that if creating jobs is your main goal, there are probably better ways to do it. Now, luckily, we actually have the benefit of a test case here, because in 2004, we basically did the exact same thing under the American Jobs Creation Act. It offered a one-year tax holiday where companies could bring back overseas profits at just a 5 percent tax rate. The idea was that they would then create jobs.

Speaker 1

11:41

But when the Senate looked at the employment numbers of the 15 companies that brought back the most money, this is what they found. These are the average numbers of U.S. Jobs at those companies over a five-year span. Here is where the big, supposedly job-creating tax holiday kicked in, and that is pretty fucking underwhelming.

Speaker 1

12:00

I would argue that's the most useless, ineffective holiday since Arbor Day. And I'm sorry, Arbor Day, but your secretary's day for trees, and we all need to accept that. In fact, instead of hiring workers, across the board, companies mostly rewarded their shareholders using 94 cents out of every dollar they brought home on stock buybacks and dividends. Something you can read about in the best-selling book, Yeah, No Fucking Shit They Did That, by acclaimed author, Everyone Who Knows Anything About Corporations.

Speaker 1

12:28

And look, for many of those companies, that may have been the best use of their money. There is no point in hiring people that you don't need. But the Trump administration is fiercely insisting that this time, their tax holiday is already creating jobs. And some companies have seemed happy to pay along, play along.

Speaker 1

12:45

Apple put out a press release not long after the tax bill was signed titled, Apple accelerates U.S. Investment and job creation, bragging they were about to create over 20,000 new jobs. And Trump was quick to take credit.

Speaker 14

12:57

President Trump tweeting in response, quote, I promise that my policies would allow companies like Apple to bring massive amounts of money back to the United States. Great to see Apple follow through as a result of tax cuts, all caps. Okay, first, that is a solid read from Jake Tapper there.

Speaker 1

13:14

In fact, I think All anchors should be forced to shout whenever Trump uses all caps in tweets. I'll show you. This morning, the president announced that he was, quote, heading to see the border wall...

Speaker 1

13:25

-...prototypes in California. -...border wall. Or, today, Today, the president wished all Americans a happy Easter! But...

Speaker 1

13:35

But... But for all Trump's excitement, those 20,000 Apple jobs were probably going to happen anyway, given that the hiring was entirely consistent with what Apple was doing in the United States before the tax cut bill passed. And Tim Cook knows this. This is how he responded when asked just how much of his hiring spree was down to Trump's new tax plan.

Speaker 9

13:55

There are large parts of this that are a result of the tax reform, and there's large parts of this that we would have done in any situation. And so, I haven't spent a lot of time in categorizing those 2, because to me, this is about America. It's not about which bucket you put things in.

Speaker 1

14:13

Yeah, but actually, It does matter which bucket you put things in, because I would rather put things in a bucket labeled smart economic policy than 1 labeled put money in here, I like money, thanks dummies, Tim Cook. And look, look, there are legitimate debates over how and how much we should tax corporate profits, but we just had a huge chance to reform our tax code, and we absolutely blew it. Because effective tax reform is not just about lowering rates, it's about closing loopholes.

Speaker 1

14:42

For instance, 1 reasonable idea raised last year was forcing companies to pay a minimum tax in every single country they operate in. It's a bit complicated, but that may well have reduced their abuse of tax havens. But that proposal never even got out of committee. So the result here is that our tax code is still full of loopholes, and however much Trump talked about how tax reform would benefit cops and pipe fitters, it's worth knowing that once he got behind closed doors, his message seemed to change.

Speaker 6

15:10

We're told the president is still celebrating passage of the Republican tax cut bill. Sources with first-hand knowledge tell CBS News that he told a group of wealthy people at his exclusive Mar-a-Lago estate, quote, you all just got a lot richer.

Speaker 1

15:26

That's right. So, on Tuesday, as you scrape together your taxes and like Cardi B, wonder what Uncle Sam is doing with your motherfucking money. -...rest assured that Donald Trump's tax reform continues to let companies engage in sophisticated tax avoidance schemes.

Speaker 1

15:41

And to those companies, I say this. On behalf of America, please enjoy this double Irish with a Dutch sandwich. I made it for you