I've heard of things like that happening in Japan with people having some pretty meaningless jobs just so they aren't unemployed, or you have more people than required just to work on a simple task just to have them doing something. It's a bit suprising to hear this starting to crop up in European countries.

What the Gov here does too now is they've started schemes to return people to work, basically if a company has 20 employees they can request a gov paid intern for up to 3 years work placement, basically the worker gets experience and a 9-5 job but the wage is paid by the Gov not the company so they just offer experience and they get the worker for it...

Of course what has started to happen more and more now is if there is an actual position in a company going, rather than offering a salery and creating a job they will instead go for this option which still is just a drain on the Tax system just to make it appear that someone isn't "unemployed" it wasn't bad when it wasn't creating jobs... but now it is actually costing real jobs, it's taking the piss completely.

What's really shitty about this is that Apple touts temselves as an example to others, in how accurate and fair they are when it comes to paying their taxes. It's allegedly part of their pholosophy to pay the appropiate taxes and give back some of their success.

None of that is technically wrong. They had the irish governements blessing in doind what they did, but it still smacks hypocrisy.

Yeah but illegal immigrants cost us 1/1000th of what these corporations do. Lets be mad at them instead.

Fair point. Profits before people in their eyes.

well... that's what happens when the economy is global yet social security system only are local. if it would be easy to run a company from the moon, i bet all headquarters would be there.

Amen to that

There is no tax for the rich, they can avoid it and even if they are taxed, they will just send the tax to the normal 99% of the people by increasing the price of their products.

In th end, it's the average joe who is taxed indirectly when they buy more expensive products.

It is one of the pillars of the austrian economics. Leftists don't understand that above, they just want a world where producers are taxed to the sky while the prices of their products remain low (control of prices by force) <- It is being done in Venezuela and the result is empty shelves in supermarkets, scarcity of all kinds of products.

I'm an accountant. My clients pay very little tax. If the big money making companies don't pay taxes, why should they?

Because they can't afford to exploit the loopholes, duh!

In all seriousness is not that hard to have untaxed income.For almost five years now I've had between 15k-35k of untaxed income every year by flipping cars and not register the car to my name, I think people just need to make more investments that are dealt mostly in cash.