The courts may say there's nothing sinister about it; that doesn't preclude me from saying so.
* Tax avoidance by regular people is overwhelmingly accomplished by doing things that tax law subsidizes because we think they're good - home ownership, saving for retirement, etc. Wealthy people and megacorps tend to avoid tax by moving revenue between countries, leveraging campaign donations to effect beneficial changes to the law, and dragging out tax cases to reach settlements.
* Giant corporations can and do avoid the entirety of their tax burden, but this option is not open to regular wage-earners, because an ad campaign for shoes is considered to be an "investment" and a parent feeding their children is not. Even in the best case (if we pretend that all of the activities used by megacorps to avoid tax are "good" in the sense of contributing to GDP) this has the effect of increasing the tax burden on individuals, because no matter how much Nike contributes to GDP it will never fix a pothole or build a fire station.
* Your complaint about misdirected anger (people being mad at Nike rather than the legislature) is at best a nitpick (most people understand this and are just speaking lazily) and at worst outright false (in that the main reason megacorps pay so little tax is because of lobbying and aggressive legal action by those same megacorps).
Bottom line is that these (tax avoidance by regular wage-earners like the one in the case you cited, and tax avoidance by Nike, Amazon, et al) are not equivalent, and conflating them can serve no purpose other than to justify the sins of the latter with the virtues of the former.
Comments
The courts may say there's nothing sinister about it; that doesn't preclude me from saying so.
* Tax avoidance by regular people is overwhelmingly accomplished by doing things that tax law subsidizes because we think they're good - home ownership, saving for retirement, etc. Wealthy people and megacorps tend to avoid tax by moving revenue between countries, leveraging campaign donations to effect beneficial changes to the law, and dragging out tax cases to reach settlements.
* Giant corporations can and do avoid the entirety of their tax burden, but this option is not open to regular wage-earners, because an ad campaign for shoes is considered to be an "investment" and a parent feeding their children is not. Even in the best case (if we pretend that all of the activities used by megacorps to avoid tax are "good" in the sense of contributing to GDP) this has the effect of increasing the tax burden on individuals, because no matter how much Nike contributes to GDP it will never fix a pothole or build a fire station.
* Your complaint about misdirected anger (people being mad at Nike rather than the legislature) is at best a nitpick (most people understand this and are just speaking lazily) and at worst outright false (in that the main reason megacorps pay so little tax is because of lobbying and aggressive legal action by those same megacorps).
Bottom line is that these (tax avoidance by regular wage-earners like the one in the case you cited, and tax avoidance by Nike, Amazon, et al) are not equivalent, and conflating them can serve no purpose other than to justify the sins of the latter with the virtues of the former.