It’s totally crazy. One of my best friends’ family owns a big steel company. Last year the rate of tax they paid was -20%. That’s not a typo - they actually ‘paid’ negative tax (mostly due to clever accounting tricks to do with carried losses and ‘leasing’ physical assets from shell companies in tax havens: https://finbox.com/NYSE:MT/explorer/effect_tax_rate). I talked to him about it a while ago, and he knows as well as everyone else that it’s completely absurd and wrong. But of course as long as these loopholes exist, their accountants will exploit them, because, I mean, that’s their job. I’m not a tax lawyer but it seems to me what the US (or the UK in my case) needs to do is actually eliminate these loopholes so that, for instance, everyone receiving any kind of income from a foreign company needs to pay at least e.g. 40% tax in total on that income - if the foreign jurisdiction doesn’t tax that much, then it should be topped up in taxes to our government. That should apply to anyone who’s effectively domiciled in the country, and if it doesn’t happen then they should be arrested for non-payment of taxes and have their assets seized.

Sadly I don’t think this - or anything like this - will happen until people realise that when we say “fund X or Y by raising taxes on the rich”, “the rich” doesn’t refer to people earning $100k a year or whatever. This is about people who have an amount of money that’s orders of magnitude more than even relatively successful people could ever make in a thousand lifetimes. And we’re only asking that they be made to pay the same rate as everyone else!