Germany Urges Global Minimum Tax For Digital Giants (yahoo.com) 275
Germany is backing a global minimum tax rate as Europe looks to levy tax notably on U.S. tech giants. "Europe is trying to devise a strategy to tax profits from the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and digital platforms such as YouTube and Airbnb which currently manage to keep fiscal exposure to a bare minimum," reports Yahoo News. From the report: "We need a minimum tax rate valid globally which no state can get out of (applying)," Scholz, a social democrat in conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government, told the "Welt am Sonntag" weekly. Digital platforms "aggravate a problem which we know well from globalization and which we are trying to counter -- the shifting of profits to fiscally beneficial regions," said Scholz. Scholz explained he had launched an initiative designed to help states react to so-called fiscal dumping in support of embryonic OECD plans designed to fight tax transparency and cross-border tax evasion. "We require coordinated mechanisms which prevent the displacement of revenues to tax havens," said Scholz. A March proposal by the Commission includes introducing a tax as a bridge measure until such time as the OECD can roll out a measure which can be applied globally.
The US will never agree to this (Score:3, Insightful)
They can go pound sand
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Luckily what the US wants or doesn't want is irrelevant in this matter.
Much like the country itself is becoming more and more irrelevant on the world stage.
US is a high tax country. Ireland is the target (Score:5, Interesting)
Germany is complaining about countries with LOW corporate tax rates. The US has HIGH corporate tax rates.
Germany's corporate tax rate is about 15%.
The US corporate tax rate was 35% federal plus average 5% state = 40%, among the highest in the developed world. That's why most large "American" companies have their official tax headquarters and much of their operations in Europe - they'd rather pay 15% tax rather than 40%.
The tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) reduced the U.S. rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Plus 5% state, so now it's 26%, still almost double the German rate.
The target of this is Ireland. Though their nominal rate is 12.5%, they allow BER that results in an effective rate around 1%.
The US would LOVE for Europe to have higher rates, similar to the US, so that "American" companies like Dell, Apple and Amazon would have less incentive to pay their taxes in Ireland, instead paying them in (and to) the US.
The problem is, most every country other than the US recognizes that receiving tax revenue is a good thing, and having people invest in factories, fabs, etc is good for your country. As Barak Obama said "if you want people to do less of something, tax it". The US taxes investment. They have high taxes on factories, fabs, development centers - companies - because apparently they want people to do less building of companies in the US. Other countries aren't so stupid. They WANT companies like Dell, Google, and Apple to put their operations in their countries, so they don't tax the hell of that like the US does.
Time for pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation? (Score:5, Interesting)
So far everything I have seen in this discussion (both above and below this 'insertion point' for this comment') has been mindless regurgitation of stupid lies and complaints about the lies. Just the place for an appeal to first principles in search of a well reasoned debate. ROFLMAO.
What we have now are tax systems that reward corporate cancers for becoming as huge and cancerous as possible. Insofar as there is any pretense of justification, it always comes down to "bigger is better", so the profits MUST increase.
I regard that as an insane anti-solution in search of a real problem. There will NEVER be any profit that "solves" the fake problem because there is always a larger number. Cancers always kill their hosts. In this case, corporate cancers will eventually kill the societies that are hosting them. Or maybe they already have, and we're just walking dead and about to discover that our extinction is the natural resolution of the Fermi Paradox.
Strangely enough, I think there is a solution, and the Germans seem to be on the right track. However I think it is better if your think in terms of pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation. As market share increases, so should the tax rate on your profits. This is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an incentive to split the company into competing companies that will take the good ideas into different directions, while simultaneously giving us MORE choices and MORE freedom. The basic objective (per my sig) should be to make sure there are around 3 to 7 choices in play for each shopping decision, not the 1 or 2 choices that the profit maximizers demand.
What we have now is a pro-greedom taxation system. America just has the greediest and most dysfunctional version of it.
Time's up, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Re: Time for pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation? (Score:2, Troll)
So the better a company does, the higher a rate of taxes they pay on that success? And if they are barely above water, the tax rate is less?
How is that not punishing success again?
Tearing down the giga factory doesn't encourage (Score:2)
> I also propose a 5% gross wealth tax on accrued resources to incentivize reinvestment. This will also prevent the own a billion in stock but never sold
So suppose you wanted to invest $100 milion to build a next-generation battery development complex and factory, and perhaps a factory to build electric cars. You get some other investors together and would set up an electric car company; perhaps you'd call it Alset.
You'd all own the company, each having a certain amount of stock. If the company s
Public masterbation of 516741 (Score:2)
Z^-1
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People must love when you walk into a room, my guess is everyone quiets down and shuffles away?
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Z^-2
Re:Public masterbation of 4456913 (Score:2)
Z^-3
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You sure do talk about public masturbation a lot. you should probably consult a therapist about that, and a lot of the time your responses are incoherent. Should also discuss that with him.
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8===D~`,'`,'
Just for you buddy.
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The target of this is Ireland. Though their nominal rate is 12.5%, they allow BER that results in an effective rate around 1%.
OK... But what happens when Ireland responds to this act by setting the corporate tax equal to the minimum BUT simultaneously creates a "Corporate Incentive" or "Tax Grandfathering" program that financially rewards companies by how much $$$ they paid in taxes, So meets the letter of the law "A minimum tax", However, essentially pays companies back the entire dollar amount
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Then they'd be shocked to find that production moves to their country, and they end up with higher tax revenue as the end result of lower tax rates - something Ireland figured out a long time ago.
Merely moving production into Germany is not sufficient for that outcome.
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The competition is basically mathematical. 0 x A=0 (Score:2)
What you said is true.
Also, we know that businesses make these decisions largely based on accountants and other nerds doing the math, to maximize after-tax profit. We're not comparing Germany with Cambodia, but rather two EU nation's. When Apple does $50 billion in EU sales each year, a ten percent difference in tax rates between two EU countries is probably going to be enough make the decision for them.
The way the math works out, until the tax rate of country A is close to the tax rate of similar competi
To beat Dallas Cowboys, you have to outscore them (Score:2)
I'm not sure if my explanation was clear, so let me mention a conversation I heard yesterday.
If you're trying to calculate the revenue-optimum sales tax on big screen televisions, it's not easy. Too high and you'll hurt revenue by drastically reducing how many people buy new large TVs. Too low and you've left potential revenue on the table. That's the concept you mentioned.
Some things are less murky, more clear.
Last night I was at a friend's house and on the television was the Dallas Cowboys football game.
Re:US is a high tax country. Ireland is the target (Score:5, Insightful)
and having people invest in factories, fabs, etc is good for your country
That's why the Cayman Islands are full of factories, fabs, etc...
Tax havens don't work by attracting actual companies with actual headquarters and actual production. Many years ago a journalist went to the Cayman Islands to find all those corporate headquarters. He found one building where a hundred or so international corporations share one office. The kind of corporations that have their own streets named after them in their actual corporate locations.
This is all about money and nothing else. Pure money. Not money tied to any productivity, but the same kind of money you use in speculative derivate finance products. Money completely removed from any economic effect.
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The problem is, most every country other than the US recognizes that receiving tax revenue is a good thing, and having people invest in factories, fabs, etc is good for your country. As Barak Obama said "if you want people to do less of something, tax it". The US taxes investment. They have high taxes on factories, fabs, development centers - companies - because apparently they want people to do less building of companies in the US. Other countries aren't so stupid. They WANT companies like Dell, Google, an
There are two kinds of income (Score:2)
There are two types of income. There's income produced by labor, and income produced by investment.
Income gained by labor is called wages.
Income gained by re-investing the fruits of your labor is called profit.
A tax on profit is a tax on investment.
It's almost universally recognized, by every developed nation, that investment is key to a country's success, so heavy taxes on it are a bad idea.
There are two or three other major categories of things a country can tax. When people get money, they can either us
Re: There are two kinds of income (Score:2)
LOL.
Boring propaganda is boring.
âoeInvestmentsâ come out of revenue before it is taxed. You donâ(TM)t get taxed âoeinvestingâ in your business.
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They can go pound sand
Actually Germany pounds lignite.
Re:The US will never agree to this (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't read the first sentence of the summary, huh?
It doesn't matter if the US agrees or not. What Germany is proposing is that the EU implements a minimum global tax rate for companies that do business in the EU. So if the minimum global rate is say 10% and the US levies 15% all is well. If the US only levies 5% then the EU will collect the other 5%. Numbers made up.
This has nothing to do with the US though. This is about tax havens and companies funnelling profits out of the EU. They use bullshit like ridiculous licencing fees to a holding company in the Cayman Islands to claim that their EU operation is making no profit and only has to pay a tiny bit of tax there, but the EU will just tax them based on global income instead.
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like ridiculous licencing fees to a holding company in the Cayman Islands to claim that their EU operation is making no profit
"Ridiculous" is no more than an opinion here -- it's no more ridiculous than the franchising fees McDonalds charges all its restaurant owners for the rights to use its name and sell food - the vast majority of the individual restaurants owners' profits have to paid away to the parent company that licenses their franchise, after subtracting that and expenses and sales, there's ab
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Just the US brands and US innovation parts.
Once all the EU starts to demand more tax, US brands have the freedom to find better nations with better tax laws.
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Then add that nation wide feeling of the EU telling Ireland what to do.
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It doesn't matter if the US agrees or not. What Germany is proposing is that the EU implements a minimum global tax rate for companies that do business in the EU. So if the minimum global rate is say 10% and the US levies 15% all is well. If the US only levies 5% then the EU will collect the other 5%. Numbers made up.
How would it change anything then? The US already collects taxes on overseas operations for all US-based corporations, effectively instituting exactly this sort of minimum tax. Any taxes paid overseas can be deducted from the taxes that are owed to the US. If enough taxes are paid overseas, no taxes are owed to the US for those overseas operations.
I think where the US system goes off the rails is that it allows US corporations to avoid paying those taxes by keeping the money overseas more or less indefinite
Wasn't that the point of the EU (Score:5, Interesting)
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No, it was to prevent another major European war by ensuring that the major European powers would be too economically dependent on each other to risk fighting each other.
You're thinking of NATO (Score:2)
Re: The US will never agree to this (Score:2)
What, because Germany wants a piece of the action without fostering any of the environment that lead to it's creation?
But it's not fair!
Non-Digital companies (Score:2)
The companies dodging the most tax are not the "digital companies" but the old style hardware companies.
Germany thus also subsidizes this way Siemens, Daimler, etc...
This problem has to be solved first.
https://www.industryweek.com/c... [industryweek.com]
Re:The US will never agree to this (Score:5, Interesting)
EU does not need to ask permissions how to tax countries selling to their consumers.
Yes they do. It is a blatant violation of WTO rules to tax American products differently based on their origin. So they have to craft this carefully so that only American companies pay the tax and no European companies are inadvertently snagged, without explicitly saying that is their goal. One way to do this is to penalize "bigness", but that is clearly a contrived distinction, so expect this to be vigorously challenged by the US in the WTO courts.
Scholz's words will come back to haunt him. He is basically admitting to designing an illegal tax policy. It is hard to claim you are not intentionally targeting Americans when you have already clearly stated that you are.
Re:The US will never agree to this (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't about products. This is about companies that operate in the EU. For example Apple has subsidiaries in most EU countries and a holding company in Ireland where it sends all its global profits to.
Those subsidiaries will be forced to pay the global tax rate. Apple can either pay to close them down and leave the EU, which it won't do because the EU is an incredibly lucrative market.
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According to TFA, he is talking about a tax on revenue (sales), not profits.
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The exact implementation details might focus on sales because if companies hide their profits with ridiculous licencing fees then what else can you go on? And it might as well be punitive, to encourage them to work with the proper tax system and pay the right amount instead of getting an inflated estimate.
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expect this to be vigorously challenged by the US in the WTO courts.
Since when does the US believe in the WTO?
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lol, nope they don't need to ask permission, they don't get to. Period.
Unless there is a physical presence within their country, they've got zero ability to tax.
Sending electrons over another company's communications channel does not constitute a physical presence.
Ever heard of tarriffs? Donald Trump certainly has.
If anybody outside of country X sells something to the residents of country X, then the government of country X can impose a tarriff on it. And the residents of country X pay that tarriff when they buy whatever the 'something' is.
Tax, tarriff? Tomayto, tomahto.
Re: The US will never agree to this (Score:2)
The EU is a scam (Score:2, Insightful)
You have to keep in mind Germany's long history of wanting money from *other* countries, and I do mean WWII.
The EU is no different; it's controlled by Germans, their banks are in Germany.
Fair taxes my ass.
They drained Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain out of money.
The EU (at least monetary union) suffers from a similar problem as the US, a large geographic region using the same currency.
But when the European Parliament discussed a tax equivalent to the US tax, Germany who controls the EU and would've been
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Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain got into trouble by not managing their own economies and spending very well.
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It's not like Ireland said no to the EU and then was dragged in by the scruff of its neck or anything.
In this thread (Score:2, Insightful)
Arrogant Americans who think the world still revolves around them. The tech giants of the world (and the Starbucks types too) need to pay a fair share of their profits back to the nations in which they do business. I would't care so much but none of these businesses are squeaky clean either - Starbucks with their litter and attendant ecological costs, Facebook with their data harvesting, Apple with their unrepairable ewaste. And so on. Now I know some Slashtard (every cunt on here is oh so clever) will be a
Re: In this thread (Score:2)
I was actually going to go with "entitled douche simpleton" instead of communist. Don't like these companies behavior? Don't use their products. Oh, I know, you don't have a choice, right? Then start your own free services that pay the bills without doing any of the stuff you don't like.
Here's a tip: if you aren't the paying customer, you are the product. Don't expect free shit and private enterprise to be charities.
Tax on the final sale is the only way to do it (Score:2)
Income tax, inheritance tax, even VAT, all that crap is subject to waaaay to many loopholes. But it doesn't matter if Joe is a billionaire or a pauper, he buys something at the register or gets it delivered, tax that sale and it's much simpler to audit and enforce than all the other tax methods combined.
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Income tax, inheritance tax, even VAT, all that crap is subject to waaaay to many loopholes. But it doesn't matter if Joe is a billionaire or a pauper, he buys something at the register or gets it delivered, tax that sale and it's much simpler to audit and enforce than all the other tax methods combined.
This does nothing for the digital giants. There is no point of sale for Google or Facebook. There is no physical good or even digital good to tax this way as they are even giving their "digital goods" away for free. Google and Facebook need to be taxed in Germany on the amount of revenue they receive from German citizens.
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So mandate that the credit card companies/paypal report all transactions to the govt(oh wait they do that) and have the govt go after the people in the country for not paying VAT et al. Oh wait, that would place more burden on the banks and credit card companies and Germany can't have that.
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So mandate that the credit card companies/paypal report all transactions to the govt(oh wait they do that) and have the govt go after the people in the country for not paying VAT et al.
What transaction? If Apple pays Facebook to display ads in Germany, there isn't a transaction in Germany to tax even though Facebook just sold something of value to Apple which originated in Germany (German eyeballs).
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They sell add space to advertisers. They sell data to third parties. Can't we tax these sales? preferably out of existence?
If course you can but Germany can tax it at 100% and it doesn't really matter if the transaction is taking place elsewhere. Apple can buy ads from Facebook in the USA, Cayman Islands, or some random 3rd world country. Facebook is selling a German product (eyeballs) but the transaction doesn't exist in Germany to tax.
Re: Tax on the final sale is the only way to do it (Score:2, Troll)
So why should it be taxes? Facebook is costing German users literally nothing. It's providing them with a service they want at no cost, and paying for that service by selling advertisements to non-german companies. And Germany thinks its entitled to a piece of that? Why?
There's no rational way to justify it. The only reason they can give is "because we want that money". They can try to dress it up by talking about tax shelters and "big business" and shit, but at the end of the day it just boils down t
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So why should it be taxes? Facebook is costing German users literally nothing. It's providing them with a service they want at no cost, and paying for that service by selling advertisements to non-german companies. And Germany thinks its entitled to a piece of that? Why?
There's no rational way to justify it.
Your assumption is that ad supported platforms cost nothing. Google and Facebook are selling *something* for billions of dollars. That *something* originates in Germany. So just because no money crosses the border into Germany, it's still obvious that Google and Facebook are selling a German resource. This assumption that ad supported platforms are *free* needs to end. Your attention and your privacy are obviously very valuable as companies are willing to spend billions of dollars for it.
Re: Tax on the final sale is the only way to do it (Score:2)
Those sales happen on the Internet, so Google can say they happen in California.
Does Germany get some taxing authority over California now? Good luck enforcing that.
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We have just such a loophole in place already. Food (groceries) is exempt from sales tax. Gas taxes? Poor people don't drive that much. Take the bus (subsidized).
If I put a tax of $15 on $100 of groceries
Then the rich people will have to cough up $115. The poor won't 'not eat'. They will be able to spend 85% of whatever they have in their pockets for food. Maybe shop at Safeway or Walmart instead of Metropolitan Market.
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Maybe shop at Safeway or Walmart instead of Metropolitan Market.
And they have to be able to get there, which can cost money they don't have. Hence they tend to shop locally in small amounts which is less cost efficient than driving to a store if you already have a car
.
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Food banks. You can make the 'Muh poor people' argument all the way down to not having the money plus 15% tax for a stick of gum.
Where I live, we don't tax food anyway. So if you don't have enough money for food, tax policy isn't a solution anyway.
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Maybe poor people do without - I mean, f*ck you, I got mine!
Maybe they do. But the problem with taking 'regressive' taxes off of people and placing them on corporations is that the 15% you thought you would be collecting from them just gets tacked onto the cost of those products that the poor people need. And it ends up being the same number of dollars (or Euros, or whatever) that come out of their pockets.
The only viable way to help poor people is to hand out the essentials.
Re: Tax on the final sale is the only way to do it (Score:2)
Isn't that what welfare programs are for? And those are paid for by what? Oh, taxes paid by people that can afford to.
Stop oversimplifying stuff to create already-solved problems. Yes I understand there are people that want to eliminate welfare programs behind ridiculous fantasies of "fraud" and "waste" but that's all bluster and cheap applause lines to win elections. There is a reason that we haven't seen freeware reform in years - the pols are all talk and no action because they want the issue.
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Because rich people never spend money on anything other than small items $100 or so at a time?
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it doesn't really affect the rich at all. But it can be the difference between eating or not for the poor.
Most state sales taxes in the USA are set up such that groceries and medicine are not taxed for this very reason. However, if you want that million dollar yacht, you can expect to be taxed on it. Is it still a loophole if it only benefits the poor? Either way, regressive it isn't.
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Yet the 100% of their income that poor people spend have an onerous amount of corporate income tax built into the prices of everything they buy.
First you need to understand what is going on (Score:5, Informative)
Please, do understand what "Double Irish" means concerning taxes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Double Irish:
Adobe Systems ...
Airbnb
Apple Inc.
Facebook
General Electric
Google
IBM
Microsoft
Oracle Corp.
Pfizer Inc.
Starbucks
Yahoo!
There is more to understand going on here (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no need for corporate taxes if you just tax those three directly. (1) can be replaced by a sales tax. (2) can be replaced by an earned income tax. (3) can be replaced by a unearned income tax (interest on savings, distributions). None of these can be thwarted by the Double Irish. (1) yields tax revenue in the country where the sale occurred. (2) yields tax revenue in the country where the company is operating (has employees). (3) yields tax revenue in the country where the owners reside. All bases are covered. The only difference is in the bookkeeping.
The only reason the Double Irish works is because corporations can exist simultaneously in multiple countries. People can only exist in one country at a time, so they can't pull off a Double Irish. So it's easy to eliminate this problem - eliminate corporate taxes and shift them to sales, earned income, and unearned income taxes. The only problem is that a large number of people mistakenly think that corporate taxes have no impact on people, and so feel taxing corporations is preferable to taxing people.
There is no difference - no matter what you tax, in the end a person somewhere pays for it. Taxes are an assignment of a percentage of the country's productivity to the government coffers. And since the only source of productivity is people (everything a company does is done by its employees), in the end all taxes are paid for by people. Get yourself over the notion that corporate taxes are necessary and the Double Irish problem vanishes. Corporate taxes accomplish nothing which cannot be accomplished with different taxes.
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Who pays corporate taxes?
Corporations.
Now, you can apply some circular logic to show that somehow, in the end, it is always people who pay taxes. Not that I couldn't re-apply the same kind of logic to show that people, in turn, will respond by a) buying less, b) buying cheaper things (which usually have a lower profit margin) or c) turning to other alternatives such as self-made, neighbour-help, etc. -- and voila, I can now prove that any tax on people in the end is paid by corporate profits.
So it's easy to eliminate this problem - eliminate corporate taxes and shift them to
Now that is a kind of logic people need
Re: There is more to understand going on here (Score:2)
I'm disappointed. Saw "modest proposal" and found no mention of eating orphans.
Great Firewall of EU (Score:3)
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Ah yes, the great EU firewall that enforces our GDPR rights... Oh, wait, we just force companies that do business in the EU to comply with our laws. And strangely even though the EU is an authoritarian hell-hole on the verge of fascism/communism and being overrun by Muslims we still find that a lot of companies want to be here.
there is a better way (Score:2)
The fact is, that we can have the delivery trucks collect the tax. Ideallly, all nations/states would put a simple agreed upon tax. So, for many nations, they have a VAT of typically 20%. We can all collect 20%. If a business is caught NOT paying the taxes, or lying about the goods, they will be blocked from shipping to other nations. IOW, it really is not worth it to cheat.
"No, thank you," he said politely. (Score:3)
No. People need to be able to vote with their feet as a last resort. Escaping even the sweet-talking charismatic overlords who rise to power in a democracy is a necessary right. Democracy is a means to an end, and is not the end itself, which is the freedom to pursue your own dreams and make your own life better.
There should never be a world government (Sorry, my fellow Star Trek nerds) because then there is nowhere to flee to when (not if) it goes bad. And that means not beginning to internationalize forced tax rates.
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Even then, people can still leave since warp drive FTL has been an existing tech for at least 150 years before the Federation was even founded and was already in widespread civilian use. There are still many worlds that are not under UFP cont
Forget digital (Score:2)
I love it, Government always tries this (Score:2)
They want to tax gross revenue (before expenses) instead of net revenue (after expenses). To add a tax component as if it is a true expense.
The second issue is who would do this? The cost and overhead of implementation would overwhelm any ability to monitor the system. Each and every layer of every government involved would be skimming extra off the top for themselves. Much of the funds would just disappear i
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The (legitimate) problem they are trying to solve is that large companies have been playing games with where they recognize revenue and costs in order to make the balance low in high-tax areas, and high in low (or no) tax areas. Largely with no correspondence with where the work or sales actually take place. Two examples (which many other companies do in one form or another):
1. Apple sells a lot of hardware in Germany, but the hold a lot of licensing rights in a company chartered out of Ireland. The Irish s
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But wasn't the article about global taxes? And one thing I do know I don't want a bunch of other countries deciding how much of my income they get and I have nothing to say about it. And mark my words they say big tech now, but the real goal is all businesses/employee pay checks.
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"Germany Urges Global Minimum Tax For Digital Giants"
should be
"Germany Urges EU Wide Minimum Tax For Digital Giants"
Interesting sounds like the US Federal Taxes my businesses pay along with FICA, State, Sales, Gas, County and Local taxes here in the US. It is also interesting none of the layers ever look at the total all the taxing entities take from private businesses and individuals. It is always our tax is just this small amount which is tot
Well, Duh (Score:2)
movement of money (Score:2)
Tax the movement of money, not profits.
Tax both sides of all transactions - buying and selling, transferring money overseas or account to account.
no tax deductions.
cash gets taxed when it is withdrawn or deposited,
how to tax circulated cash, I dunno, maybe a high tax on cash to cover projected recirculation.
Re:I wonder (((who))) is proposing this tax? (Score:4, Funny)
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Oh Americans... We don't. Not like you. (Score:2, Interesting)
You have to realize that our "being religious" has nothing to do with your "being religious".
It's only on paper. And only because we have no separation of church and state, and so if you are born, you 1. automatically default to the religion of your parents, and 2. the Catholic and evangelical churches, and *only* them, *literally* have a state tax, that is deducted from your salary, unless you actively opt out.
Literally nobody, but a few very old people and a couple of nutjobs, goes to church.
Very often, n
Re: Oh Americans... We don't. Not like you. (Score:3)
We've been hearing the same song in the UK for nearly 20 years. So far the Muslims have totally failed to ban pork, Christmas or poppies. It's not happening here and it's not happening in Germany either.
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Echo brackets are used around names of people with Jewish background. Jesus would certainly qualify.
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PROTIP: The purpose of tax is only and exclusively, to finance the services that our state provides us.
Maybe in your world. In the US there are political parties [americansocialists.org] who view taxes as a means to redistribute wealth (they call it solving "income inequality"). Taxes are seen as a means of social engineering - not about services.
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Re:In other words, "We can't compete." (Score:5, Insightful)
Nations, provinces, counties, and cities all have to compete with each other to get people to live, work, visit, or operate a business there. If you are incapable of offering an attractive proposition of benefits vs. costs, then they won't come to you.
The solution is to make yourself more attractive, not to require all your competitors to place the same onerous burden on the people or businesses you aren't attracting.
This is a race to the bottom at best but it's really worse than that. Global companies aren't creating shell companies in obscure countries because these countries are out competing other countries with quality but rather because they managed to find a country that is willing to look the other way because they are getting 1% of a bunch of cash that they wouldn't get otherwise.
The correct solution isn't a global tax but rather to charge taxes based on sales in that country. We already do this with physical goods in the form of either sales tax or import taxes. If Germany wants to tax the iphone or facebook it should tax the company based on the amount of revenue that company is receiving from its citizens.
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At least for goods, there is no escaping the VAT on imports into the EU. I'm unsure about services but I doubt they'd leave that piggy bank unbled.
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At least for goods, there is no escaping the VAT on imports into the EU. I'm unsure about services but I doubt they'd leave that piggy bank unbled.
Google and Facebook give their "services" away for free as do many digital giants. I'm assuming they do charge a VAT on stuff like Netflix and it's possible that they charge a VAT for a European company buying ads on Facebook/Google but if Coke is buying ads on Facebook in the USA (or some obscure country) and displaying them in Europe then there is no transaction in Europe to even tax. The money is going from a USA company to another USA company even though they are buying something in Europe (eyeballs).
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The correct solution isn't a global tax but rather to charge taxes based on sales in that country.
This. The whole problem only exists because tricky account tricks can move profits around. The more complicated the tax system, the easier it is to find loopholes.
Which is why any additional complication, like the ones proposed in the past decade, will only make the problem worse. Of course, politicians not being idiots (simply corrupt criminals) know this very well. Proposals like this one (of a failed prime minister candidate, i.e. in political terms: The right person to propose something that just might
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Because this idea that you can't really tax a corporation is a fallacy based on the false assumption that there is perfectly inelastic demand for all products.
Re: In other words, "We can't compete." (Score:2)
Corporations benefit from society's existence, in fact they utterly depend on it. As such, they are required to pay to maintain it. This notion that they should be able to avoid paying as a "right", is unacceptable, and every society should be up in arms over it.
You speak about corporations as if they were living beings. They are not. Corporations don't benefit; people benefit. A corporation is just a bunch of people getting together, pooling resources, and working together. You are already taxing all of those people, some of them multiple times. You tax the employes with income tax. You tax the shareholders with capital gains taxes. You tax each purchase and sale with sales taxes and/or "value added" taxes. The idea that you need to have a second tax on t
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Liberal, of course meaning, what Americans call "neocon-libertarian"
Nonsense. A neoconservative [wikipedia.org] believes in "left" big government domestic policies combined with "right" hawkish and interventionist foreign policy. This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of libertarianism. So "neocon-libertarian" is a completely meaningless term.
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Tell us again how leftist aren't authoritarian.
Germany has a right of centre government.
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Re: Authoritarian crap (Score:2)
So would the stroke be a result of the pants-shitting, or will the stroke beget the loading of the pants?
Your statement is unclear on this incredibly important sequence of events.
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Or check the box that says "401k" (Score:2)
While I agree with the basic facts of your overall argument, I believe this particular sentence could stand to be expanded:
> Because to own the "means of production", you have to fucking TAKE it from the current owners - which requires an authoritarian state to accomplish.
The current owners, the people who own the means of production, are primarily all the people who checked the box saying yes, they do want to participate in their employer 's 401k. Together they own about $4 trillion of "means of product
Re: Hello average dumb American (Score:4, Insightful)
Such revolts are never led by the poor; they're generally organized and led by some upper class cunts who wants to put themselves on top.
Yes, people with means can sometimes rouse up the dissatisfied rabble in order to overthrow the existing power structure. This is much easier in nations which are actually impoverished. In other places - like the USA - where you dont have any real poverty, you have to come up with different ways of dividing the people when you want a civil war. Things like race, politics, and religion are usually good for that.
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In other places - like the USA - where you dont have any real poverty
*cough* * cough*
Living a sheltered life in America are we? There are pockets of poverty in America as abysmal as anywhere else in the world. I would even add that the percentage of Americans feeling economic stress (not poverty, but being threatened with instant poverty) is very high. Much higher than any casual look at financials would reveal. Hell, 90+% of Americans are threatened just by getting sick.
Re: To me there is a simple solution. (Score:2)
Elon, is that you?