you're ignoring the 20% VAT on those 3bn sales, which provided 600m tax revenue. Why is it so important that they paid 7m in corporate tax instead of any other amount?
Their business apparently has high cost of sales (like stores, personnel etc.), where by the way also taxes occur, e.g. for wages...
So I suggest to think twice if you want to paint the picture that Starbucks does not contribute it's fair share to taxes in the UK.
VAT is paid by the consumer, not the business. The business merely collects it in behalf of the tax office. Starbucks contributes 0 taxes by collecting VAT. Look up the definition of consumption taxes as opposed to corporate income taxes.
If you want to give other examples of ways companies contribute you can mention property taxes on owned properties, or jobs created which usually also have some part of pension etc contributed by the business, vehicles paying excise tax and fuel taxes, but I don't think VAT is a correct one to use.
It's like saying "the employee doesn't pay employee tax; the business does". The cost is still there for the business, who could otherwise be paying you it. Or using it to employ more people. Tax is tax.
In this case, the business could charge the same amount but keep what is currently the VAT portion. It's still tax revenue generated by a business doing work, paid by a consumer who does taxed work elsewhere to get the money, and all the government does is collect the money. Doesn't really matter which tax it is.
If business A buys from business B which buys from business C...Only the end customer pays VAT on the final transaction, none of the entities before do.
If the tax raises all of their costs and it's a competitive market then they'll all have to raise prices, because competitive market = competitive pricing and it has to come from somewhere.
The most common case where it doesn't raise prices is when they don't have any competition and are already charging the monopoly price, so the money has to come from the company because if there was any more to extract from the customer, the monopolist would have done it to begin with. But we don't really like those markets or want to promote their continued existence.
What this doesn't depend on much is the form of the tax. If it's a competitive market then VAT and corporate income tax are both getting passed on to the customer. If it's a monopolist then either one will typically come out of the monopoly rent, because charging the customers more would bankrupt them or cause them to extend the life of used goods instead of buying new ones etc.
However, corporate income tax is generally easier for multinational corporations to avoid than VAT, so they have a pecuniary interest in making people think that VAT is worse than income tax.
There's a third option: they're competitors are small business that don't have the means to do the clever tax optimization/evasions, so they were already paying full tax. So now Starbucks if it were to pay full taxes, would have to either raise their prices (but then competitors could stay at the same price, because they've already been paying those tax rates), or they can lower their margin.
It's true that these taxes make things more expensive for local businesses, but also for all businesses, as they have to employ very expensive tax lawyers to figure out the best places to put their businesses. What a waste of mental effort that could've gone into more productive careers. But that's corporation tax for you.
maybe I missed it, but I could not find anything substantial regarding the more recent years. Most points are about accounting interpretations in the years up to 2020 when Tesla finances still were weak...
What did I miss about any issues with current accounting malpractices?
That's because the securities losses took place from 2018-2020. But there are plenty of allegations regarding more recent years such as FSD deferred revenue, DMV enforcement actions, AR/AP, tax evasion, silencing critics, etc.
> (a) they find it hard to raise capital (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit
at the end a company needs to be financially successful and for this it needs to provide competitive products and services. Otherwise, they'll just be replaced.
There of course may be a chance they'll get replaced by another employee owned company, but the odds of a free-capital owned company replacing them are probably bigger as they have more freedom to make the right decisions to become successful.
Also imagine your pension would just depend on the odds of the company you have been working for a live long, because you just cannot invest into other companies because they are only owned by employees.
My pension depends on other members of my country, as well as they depend on my. The feeling of safeness (event if it’s not 100% safe) and bound is what I call “society“, meaning we go forward together very much like what most feel with their family. Never ever will I live in a country that encourage people to compete instead of collaborate, it sounds better for the 1% stakeholders but not for the 99% others.
I wish it were that simple... even if everyone tried to "collaborate" to produce the same product, there would still be some competition somewhere, at least for ideas. somehow the final products to be made need to be decided upon and the other won't be made. That also means, that somehow the people overseeing the final products have more power than the ones that were not chosen by whatever process is in place to make those decisions...
It really has not been proven, that there is a more effective organisational form for this competition better than capital allocation using markets with a lot of freedom.
For your case or "cross-generational" pensions where the young pay for the pensions of the old: That worked well while the baby boomers were working. This may go sour when the baby boomers retire and the numbers of their first and second generation of offspring decline... Even worse: if they have made the economy, tax and debt burden for those offspring so bad, they can barely buy their own home.
I actually do think that whoever becomes the next president has huge implications for all tech companies in the US and even abroad. E.g. the whole issue of AI regulation, UBI in case we get to AGI / SI soon, all sorts of tax issues etc. depend on it, not to mention that the president appoints a lot of judges...
I recently started playing with some telescopes. Long-term exposures especially of areas with a bigger angle like nebulas had quite often a starlink trail in it...
while aligning the telescope to some stars I could see the satellites quite often
If you can see it clearly with the naked eye, it's probably not a Starlink.
Did you use astronomy software to identify them, or did you assume the satellite trails must be Starlinks? I remember seeing plenty of satellites visible in the night sky even before the first Starlink launch.
I saw them through the telescope. In the 11" I could see them through the eyepiece and on the 6" it was on the cam captures. I checked e.g. with Stellarium
So I suggest to think twice if you want to paint the picture that Starbucks does not contribute it's fair share to taxes in the UK.