Evil Banks

[Suff]

Life. As we know it.

Then "Life" needs to change.

Maybe it does. Our country tried that from 1974 - 1979. Big changes. Workers first, stuff the companies. Don't have money? No problem just keep borrowing it. Well until you have to call in the IMF to borrow from them..

Look at the pain the medicine to that "Life" change caused. Generations out of work. The basis of the mess we are in today with benefits.

Then, again, from 1997 to 2010. Another "Life" changing event. We haven't seen the end of the medicine to fix that "Life" changing event yet. We're not even half way though the journey.

At work there is a guy on one of my projects who says "That worked so we changed it".

I think there's been enough of that in the UK. If we are going to ask companies to come to the UK and spend money building jobs and an economy for the UK, then we have to let them make a profit. That profit has to be measured on the entire international income of the corporate. In %.

If 4% is Billions, then that is what it is. If people have trouble doing the math of a business and how much profit it needs to survive, it is not the problem of the corporates. When people come into government who can't do that maths, then it's everybody's problem. Because, let's face it, much of the work done in the UK does not need to be done there. It is done there because we make it competitive to do that work in the UK.

If we decide to "Change Life" and make it uncompetitive, then it will go away.

And that, really is, Life.

I wonder how the teenagers of today would feel about big company profits if they were told that only one in three of them would _ever_ get a job if their demand for lower profits took all those jobs away.

If you want to see that in a microcosm just look at Greece. High government spending, low tax income, minimal inward investment into business and an economy in shambles. 60% unemployment amongst Greek Youth...

They have laws to define laws to control laws which define how businesses run and make money. As a result, businesses don't. They go elsewhere. For more than a decade Athens has been borrowing money to shore up the gap.

Every time we think we can take money (mugging companies or borrowing what we can't repay), just to throw it down the drain, our country comes unstuck and has to be fixed. Whilst many moan about the cost of that fix.

If that is the "Life" that the UK wants to change to, I'll come back when I'm a pensioner with no assets and "Enjoy" the life.....

[Workingman]

You are conflating personal finances with business finances.

Nobody is saying that businesses should not turn a profit, they have to to survive. What they should not do is abuse those from whom their profits are made. Google, Amazon, Starbuck's and the banks are all guilty of such behaviour.

Amazon paid only £1.8m on turnover of £3.35bn UK sales. It, and other companies, avoid tax using accounting devices in order to avoid tax and boost profits. It the practices were stopped this afternoon would these companies shut up shop? Not a chance. They would still make humongous profits even if they were forced to pay a full tax bill. If they left the field there would be many others, hopefully British, rushing in to take their places.

[Suff]

WM these companies are not registered in Monaco. They are paying tax somewhere. If the law says that a US company must pay tax in the US, should they then also pay tax in the UK? In that case we'd be paying the premium.

Of course then there are the companies who have subsidiaries in Ireland paying 15% tax in flagrant violation of EU tax laws.... But they are paying EU tax.

It is never as simply, cut or dried as the press would have it. If these companies were illegally evading tax legally required to be paid in the UK, then the UK would have that tax from them in a second, plus the directors in Jail. The very fact that the UK government is doing nothing more than whinging means that these companies are legally paying that tax somewhere else which his more tax amenable to them.

The message is simple. Want the tax money, then make it lucrative to do so. Notably we don't.....