Actually, that’s a very useless question. If I answer that, for example, the location of the headquarters is the place that matters, you get one kind of discussion. If I say foreign subsidiaries shouldn’t be taxed in the US, we’ll get into a whole off-shoring discussion in one form or anther anyway.

Here’s the point: You can argue that it’s not GE’s fault that US tax laws (and those in many other countries) are so full of loopholes, and you’d be ignoring it’s companies like GE that often draft the laws themselves and hand them to lobbyists or politicians. You can argue it’s not GE’s fault that our corrupt public officials are so easily (and legally) bribed. Or, you can argue that with their buying power, it is partly their fault.

They are adhering to the letter of the law and obliterating the spirit of the law. It is a giant fuck you to every tax-paying citizen of every country.

The problem isn’t that corporations will take advantage of poor regulation, hazy tax law, and opportunities to corrupt elected officials; the problem is that these opportunities exist in the first place.

Here’s the question you should ask: how do you get rid of the opportunities?

And that’s not easy. For example.. you could say that Americans can vote for politicians who favor serious campaign finance reform. But that’s “socialism”. And where did that come from? Is GE a media company? It’s the unions I tell ya. Them evil unions!

We really need the guy who changes the Google search algorithm each week to go to work for the US Treasury dept to change the corporate tax code on a yearly basis until it becomes cost prohibitive for corporations to pay tax lawyers to skirt the system. Google has been successful up until now because content farmers who spam search results find it futile to expend the energy to game Google’s system only to find the next day the game has changed. We need to apply this same strategy to foil those who are looking to game the US (and any other) tax code. Once that works, get that bastard to do the same thing with campaign finance and the SEC.

Also, why not have a sales tax on stock purchases?

[response from GE]:

It was significant losses at GE Capital in the financial crisis, not “tax avoidance” strategies, that reduced General Electric’s 2010 overall tax rate below historic levels.

Without these financial crisis losses at GE Capital, G.E.’s tax rate would have been near the average of other multinational corporations. Our tax rate will return to more normal levels this year as GE Capital recovers from the financial crisis. In short, when you lose money, you don’t pay taxes, and that’s what happened at GE Capital.

The Times points out that G.E.’s job numbers in the United States are down over the past decade, but does not provide the context: G.E.’s employment in the United States has increased in this period, apart from the sale of businesses. Those jobs weren’t eliminated; they moved to other companies.