doesn't necessarily mean they'll find it easy to come up with a solution. When I interviewed Douglas Carswell MP a few weeks ago (subscribers can read it here: Government is dead; long live iDomocracy ), he was clear that there is nothing to be done about this. The tax base is shrinking, he said, and all governments can do about it is to accept that they at least get something in the form of VAT and employment taxes and to cut their cloth accordingly. However, there are ways to force something out of the multinationals that currently tread so heavily on our economy but feature so little in our tax revenues. The obvious one is a sales or revenue tax of some kind. But the one that might work better is a unitary tax -- as discussed here . It makes sense for governments to crack down on the multinationals to a degree. We need a level playing field for domestic companies to play on -- if scale and international mobility are to be the only drivers of corporate success in the future, the future is likely to be a pretty miserable place for most of us. So we aren't against a co-ordinated effort to insist on multinationals paying tax at a rate somehow approximating the rate paid by their competitors (although we aren't particularly convinced this is possible). However, if you are an investor in big multinationals (and as a Moneyweek reader, you probably are), it is also worth