Starbucks has paid only £8.6m income tax since 1998 on £3.1bn sales, thanks to reporting consistent losses. Cable said: \”It is worrying and frankly a bit of a disgrace that Starbucks is a tip of the iceberg.\”
Pointing to similar arrangements among other multinationals with UK operations, he added: \”They are taking a lot of value out of the British economy and British consumers, and putting little in.\”
Err, the value runs the other way.
It is the consumers who value what is produced. Thus the value must, by definition, be with the consumers in the UK. No fucker is \”taking value out of the UK\” at all. They cannot, by definition, be doing so.
And, although we’re all getting bored pointing it out (but it needs saying every time or the muppets will think we’ve gone away):
– VAT, business rates, etc.
– Corp tax is not paid on sales, but on profits … and certainly not on ‘consistent losses’
– Companies don’t pay income tax, it’s corporation tax he means (insert point about tax incidence, though it woudl be wasted on an ‘economist’ like Vince).
– and of course what Tim says, though Vince is of the political tradition who thinks that government spending “puts money into the economy” so he frankly is as clueless as Lord Clueless, Mayor of Cluelesstown who couldn’t win this year’s ‘clueless twat of the year’ award only because he’d won it in each of the previous five years.
So Starbucks is not paying rent, buying locally produced products, using gas and electricity, or paying their employees?
Of the 3.1 billion sales, I wonder how much is eaten up by these?
Serf,
Given they dont make much, if any, profit then the answer is just about all of it.
‘can be’ is not how you spell ‘is.’
I’ve said from the start that they picked some really bad targets, because these are the companies that have really improved products and services over the past decade or so.
Before Starbucks came along, we had bad, reheated filter, before Amazon, expensive books, before eBay, you couldn’t make money from your junk. Before Google, well, finding information was completely different.
And we’ve got financial and oxygen thieves in parliament, people who blew £11bn on a 2 week sporting event, billions on Connecting For Health, hundreds of millions on bad control rooms telling us that we should care about the contribution of people who actually deliver?
Tim A
Not strictly true: I was a regular customer of Seattle Coffee, whose 65 stores Starbucks purchased to enter the UK market. Of course, that doesn’t undermine your point that Starbucks are still giving value to people willing to pay with their own money.
David Moore
…..Exactly
Correction to headline….
Vince Cable is a twat.