What gets me is the richest corporations in the country paying NO income taxes. Here is an idea to chew on allow corporations to deduct NO MORE THAN $1 million from their corporate taxes for each employee. Then the stockholders will have to decide if Mr. Drug Company, or Walmart CEO, or whatever should have a salary of $20million. I remember 2008 when the stockholders discovered that the top 3 Goldman Sachs execs each earned MORE THAN $65million. They rebelled and held a vote on the proposition that stockholders have an advisory on executive compensation. It didn’t quite win with 43%, but that was enough to scare the CEO into only paying himself $25million the next year. We need a lot more of that kind of rebellion!!
One way these multinational tech and biotech companies are structured is through numerous shells and subsidiaries. Just one simple example that the tech companies use is that there is a tax-exemption in Ireland on royalty payments. So they structured to move the ownership of their patents to an Irish subsidiary, license the patents to a Dutch company, which collects all the revenues for advertising sales etc, then pays a 99% royalty (I exaggerate that number for effect) to the Irish subsidiary. So only 1% of their profits are taxed as income. Then the Irish subsidiary sends the cash to the Dutch Antilles or Caymans (they call this the "Dutch Sandwich" and it is no longer legal to do, but they are grandfathered). They have other tax avoidance schemes too such as setting up other subsidiaries as finance arms, so they are taxed at a different rate and get to write off payments to themselves as an expense. This is basically and a simplistic way to explain why say GOOG or FB or AAPL can make $40 billion a year and only pay 4% of it in taxes.
As for executive pay, if I start a company and own all or a big chunk of the stock I think I should pay myself all or a big chunk of the profits. But these executives of Wall Street banks are not major owners, they are not founders. Their compensation should be tied to how much money they make for their shareholders - and often they get paid in the form of stock options. The problem there is that this leads to short term thinking. This incentivizes them to think about moving the stock price so they get bigger options bonuses each year, and a little less about long term interests of the shareholders or the company. It encourages trading of stock over building of equity and strategic thinking. And it's partly why so many went belly up in 2008 trading crap paper as AAA rated and needed $1 trillion bailout from the taxpayers just to keep from crashing the entire system.
To be fair there are exceptions. FB for example, while it does practice very aggressive tax avoidance schemes, is still something like 35% owned by the founder. Amazon too, though Amazon pays very little because they don't make a lot of profits they are constantly reinvesting in growth. Because they are run by their founders they have been very good at building value over the long term. But perhaps one of the best is Disney, which is no longer controlled by the Disney family (less than 10% I think) - but is a very well run company. They took a very long time to acquire or build a lot of assets and then, very recently, learned a new way to exploit these assets by launching their own streaming service to take advantage of the new distribution mediums. They had a huge catalog of films, and owned ESPN too, but decided to spend something like $100 billion or more to buy Fox, Lucusfilm, Marvel Comics and bought out the partners of Hulu. Amazon and Netflix owned the streaming space until last year, but now Disney is in the process of pulling all their deals with Amazon and Netflix to put their films/shows on their own service and has in just 1 year signed up close to 30 million subscribers. The leadership of Disney has acted very cleverly and deliberately to grow to adapt to the changing times, to counter-act competitors, and to maximize the profits they will earn from their catalog of entertainment. And FWIW, Disney pays an effective tax rate of between 17%-24% which is very high when compared to say Facebook, Apple and Google because their assets and subsidiaries are largely all based inside the USA.