Pfizer’s Massive Tax Dodge

Good reporting. And, yes, it's quite a tax scam that Pfizer and many other corporations routinely run. The much larger scam, though, is that Pfizer is a private corporate entity at all, instead of a nationally owned (or internationally owned) public entity. In which case, the issue of taxes (and many other nefarious issues) would be irrelevant.

Let's say Pfizer were publicly owned, a government entity. Should the government then sell needed Pfizer drugs to its own populace that would be funding the public entity Pfizer. No, there's no necessary justification for that. Health care should be freely available. So then, where would tax revenue come from to fund other government goods and services including health care in the first place? From other private taxable entities? No, since many or all of the other biggest revenue generating entities should also be nationalized to improve quality and production, opportunity and fairness while reducing or eliminating costs to people. So what will fund government goods and public services if not taxes, taxes, taxes? Government credit, as even the in-many-ways retrograde US Constitution allows. Creating credit (dollars / "coin"). Something that big private banks do of their own accord to fund much private industry and financial transactions. It's not necessarily inflationary, as long as it meets a real need.

The notion that cutting out the middle man can save you a lot of money may be true, or adequately taxing the middle man can gain you a lot of money, but in the case of Pfizer and other inherently profiteering entities, if you cut out Pfizer (as a profiteering entity) by nationalizing it, you're not only both saving and gaining a lot of money, you're eliminating a lot of corruption and a lot of potential for corruption that is inherent in corporate design and corporate law. And you're not cutting out the middle man so much as cutting out and cutting off the profiteering executive class (and some of their enabling PR, legal, and financial acolytes), because you still need the Pfizer scientists and other workers to run the new national public entity.

I think it's possible to agree that the biggest scandal is that Pfizer exists as a private entity that profiteers off of the human right to health. That Pfizer games the tax and property laws to evade taxation is a corollary to the underlying problem. As if things would be fair if Pfizer didn't do that. As if that tax money would be "spent" on real needs, rather than on, say, more executive class subsidies. The whole "fair taxation" approach can have some real world benefits, given the way the system is gamed, but at the federal level it too much serves as a distraction from the fact that the government egregiously fails to extend credit to meet human needs no matter how fair or corrupt any current level of taxation happens to be. Let more Pfizer taxation come in and watch it go right back out to fund the bloody and profiteering financial and military Empire complex. Great. Hurray for the Empire's taxation. Who cares? Often it doesn't matter. Sometimes it does, like when taxation reduces pollution or can be used as an excuse (political leverage) to fund real needs rather than to hand it right back to the bloody profiteers. Tax dodges astonish no one. And can distract entirely from the underlying problem of government subsidizing the profiteers and allowing them to exist in the first place, and/or from the government failing to simply and legally provide credit to meet real needs no matter how much or how little tax revenue comes in.

Fortunately, your report can be used toward efforts to nationalize Pfizer or to at least stop subsidizing it - both of which are well within any reasonable scope of human rights - and hopefully the report won't be used as an excuse to pretend there is no government money available for the people and that money can't legally or simply be federally credited to meet human needs, regardless of any tax dollars that come in, or don't. The corruption and cost to human life of Pfizer existing as a profiteering private entity at all is far greater than any tax it evades and any subsidy it receives. It's existence is both an ideological and effectual monstrosity, and partly bound up in that is keeping the focus on "unfair" subsidies and tax evasions. There is no fair level of taxation or subsidy for a private entity that in design and by design inherently profiteers against the public, often while neglecting and damaging a wide array of public needs.

Sure, Pfizer is bad in its tax evasion, and is corrupt otherwise, but the US doesn't need Pfizer's tax money to meet human needs. Congress needs to credit ("coin") ample targeted funds of its own accord. And that includes creating its own national pharmaceutical agency or agencies. Trying to run and enforce a system of "fair" taxation just keeps the whole destructive, profiteering mess going.

I don't know if this is the right place for a socialist manifesto or not, but I couldn't stop myself!

The fact Pfizer doesn’t pay taxes at all should have been remedied under Biden’s presidency. If tRump allowed them to not pay taxes then Biden should have reversed it. And Biden should not allow private Medicare advantage plans to rape Medicare for funds they in turn pay to their shareholders. It is just common sense and yet it is happening.

The "imports" red muricans moan about.......They are all Pfizer Apple Microsoft, Nike et al. Those "foreigners" are killing the country! Stop all imports.