Earnings Stripping

  

The name of Cardi B's second album. It's also a trick companies use to avoid paying taxes.

The method involves paying a padded amount of interest to another company in order to lower its taxable earnings figure. The company takes out extra loans it doesn't need, so it has excessive interest payments to make, which cut into the amount of profit the authorities can tax.

You are CEO of MultiGlobalHyperTech Inc., a multinational corporation with operations in the U.S. Your U.S. subsidiary earned a profit of $1 billion. You have to pay U.S. taxes on that, but you really don't want to. So...you hatch an earnings stripping scheme.

Your U.S. subsidiary takes out a $5 billion loan from your Irish subsidiary. Corporate taxes are lower in Ireland. You make payments on the $5 billion loan out of the $1 billion in U.S. profits. Those payments have to be taxed as profit for the Irish company, but you end up saving money because of the low taxes there.

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Finance: What is Ordinary Income v Long-...2 Views

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finance a la shmoop what is ordinary income versus long-term gain income ah

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tax policy it changes like the seasons if the seasons were always mean and [Seasons of the year appear]

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nasty well generally speaking throughout modern US tax history there have been

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two types of taxes those levied on your wages or personal income that you [US tax types appear]

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actively earned usually at a relatively high tax rate and those taxes levied on

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gains from investments or passive income you know like stocks that went up and

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then we're sold for cash or land that was bought cared for appreciated in [Land stamped with sold]

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value and then sold for cash well the two big keys in differentiating these

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concepts revolve around a the type of income that's coming in I heat if you

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hauled bricks to earn the money it's ordinary actively earned income [Bricks land into wheelbarrow]

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plain-vanilla work-related and be that money can be made from investment gains

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and there's a curveball here in that if the gains were realized or the [Man hit by a baseball]

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investment was turned into profits in the form of cash I eat you sold the land

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for cash not in barter for another piece of land and you did it in less than one

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year after buying it well then the tax rate applied will be the ordinary income [Tax rate table appears]

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level the higher level in part because well if you turned it into profits so

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quickly well the government figures it was kind of your job and you were

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working it pretty hard in that less than one year time period and so you actively

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earned the money and to punish you for working hard they tax you at a higher

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rate like the brick hauling ordinary income is earned rather than passive [Bricks falling and dollar signs appear]

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long term investing gains the differences can be massive in a blue

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state the marginal ordinary income rate post Trump hovers somewhere a bit beyond [Blue states appear in US]

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50 percent assuming no incremental city tax piled on top hello Manhattan we're

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looking at you the long-term gain rate hovers around 25 percent and in a red

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state with a no state tech long-term gain hovers around 20 percent and change

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there's Obamacare thrown in there so on and so if you had a gain of a

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million bucks on a security you've held 364 days and you sell it that day while

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you keep a bit less than 500 grand if you wait another day or two before

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selling while you keep more like 750 grand from that million yeah it's a

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delta of a quarter of your entire investment courtesy of qualifying for

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long-term gain treatment rather than short-term so just like the conclusion [A corvette appears]

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of a really good Saturday night you always want to try to go long-term in

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instead of short

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