France To Go Ahead With Digital Tax This Year Regardless of Possible International Deal (reuters.com) 28
France will go ahead with its tax on big digital businesses this year whether there is progress or not towards an international deal on the issue, its finance minister said on Thursday. From a report: France offered in January to suspend until the end of the year installments of its tax on big digital companies' income in France while an international deal to re-write the rules of cross-border taxation was negotiated this year. "Never has a digital tax been more legitimate and more necessary," Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told journalists on a conference call, adding such companies were doing better than most during the coronavirus crisis. Nearly 140 countries are negotiating the first major rewriting of international tax rules in more than a generation, to take better account of the rise of big tech companies that often book profit in low-tax countries.
Re:Because taxation worked out so well for France (Score:4, Insightful)
as France already got rid of their rich.
What happened to them, did the poor French bring out the guillotine again?
I've heard of only one "rich French" who left France for Russia, a certain Gerard Depardieu, but he did not renounce his French passport and eventually went back.
Who are you talking about?
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Re: Because taxation worked out so well for France (Score:1)
Perhaps you should do some research besides CNN talking points:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
France raised 75% wealth taxes and revenue dropped significantly as people took their money and left France.
Re:Because taxation worked out so well for France (Score:5, Informative)
Governments simply need more piggy banks to keep spending more and more, eventually they'll run out of corporations as France already got rid of their rich. Eventually they'll come for everyone (transportation businesses and unions have been protesting new taxes for at least the last 3 decades).
Corporations pay no taxes but they get bailed out with wild abandon every time they manage to make bad investments and get hosed during an economic downturn. US corporations just got bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars. If the French are going to make the corpocrats bleed a bit of money in the form of taxes I won't be crying any rivers over it. Here's a list of corps that paid $0.00 in US federal income tax in 2018 according to tax filings provided by the SEC:
Activision Blizzard
2018 US income: $447 million
Federal income tax after rebates: -$228 million
Effective federal income tax rate: -51%
Amazon
2018 US income: $10.8 billion
Federal tax after rebates: -$129 million
Effective tax rate: -1%
Delta Airlines
2018 US income: $5 billion
Federal tax after rebates: -$187 million
Effective tax rate: -4%
General Motors
2018 US income: $4.32 billion
Federal tax after rebates: -$104 million
Effective tax rate: -2%
Goodyear
2018 US income: $440 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$15 million
Effective tax rate: -3%
IBM
2018 US income: $500 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$342 million
Effective tax rate: -68%
JetBlue
2018 US income: $219 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$60 million
Effective tax rate: -27%
Netflix
2018 US income: $856 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$22 million
Effective tax rate: -3%
Pitney Bowes
2018 US income: $125 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$50 million
Effective tax rate: -40%
Tech Data
2018 US income: $210 million
Federal tax after rebates: -$10 million
Effective tax rate: -5%
.
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This idea that we are PAYING these companies is just crazy. And bailing out an industry is fine, as long as we break them up, and remove the idiots that ran them into the ground in the first place.
The rest of the west needs to be similar.
Re:Because taxation worked out so well for France (Score:4, Funny)
This is right and proper. The citizens pay taxes to the collector, AKA the federal government, and the federal government splits up the tithes between our corporate overlords.
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What I'm hearing you say is,
The federal government is a service layer; the systemd for our corporate colonels.
.
More like the public treasury is a corporate insurance service. If you turn a profit you get to keep it, if you suffer losses the politicians you bought ensure that you get bailed out by the public treasury and on top of that you are exempt from paying taxes. There literally is no downside for these people.
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What is the contribution through employee income taxes, property taxes and various other taxes and fees? Just because they don't pay wealth taxes, doesn't mean they don't pay taxes.
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Throwing a bunch of numbers for effect are misleading to say the least. I know this is not popular, but taking statistics out of context does not help anyone.
I do not know what happened with Activision's "rebates", but their tax rate changes significantly every year: In fact it was a whopping 76% in 2017: https://csimarket.com/stocks/s... [csimarket.com] . Why does the report focus on a single year, and choose the "shocking" ones, but ignore history?
Amazon, for example, tries to operate at zero profit. Everyone knows that,
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France provides money to the companies that will be taxed, much more than whatever the tax will be...
Re: Cut off France, anyone notice? (Score:2)
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France provides money to the companies that will be taxed
You can file that one under "Things that I don't care about."
Anything else?
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And why would you want France to be black holed exactly ?
Facebook, Google, and others are making huge profit everywhere in the world, yet pay zero taxes on their profits. This is true in the EU thanks to the Ireland/NL sandwich, and true in the US too, by the way, thanks to Delaware. France is trying to make them pay taxes for their activity in France. How is that taking anything from you ? If the taxes are too high, Google can stop providing Google services in France ... but I doubt it. In any case, it's t
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No.
Good (Score:3)
There should certainly be some system for international trade, but corporations capable of working across multiple sectors to experience horizontal growth purely as a product of economies of scale and internal optimizations while overpowering smaller corporations definitely aren't the ideal. Everything about that from the impact on the economies of individual nations through the ability of nations like China to absolutely control their whole economy and turning every corporation there into an extension of their government is wrong.
Every nation should control it's own supply chain, if something is truly scare (pro-tip: nothing is if your nation is bigger than Grenada,) then there's a clear market for trade, but that's not a thing any developed nation should actually be concerned with prior to securing their own supply chain.
LOL good luck with that, France (Score:2)
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So, GooTwitFace will forgo the profits they could still have made in France because they can't keep 100% of it, and in doing so open the field to their competition? Now, I'm admittedly no businessman, but that does not seem like a sound strategy.
And if you're right, that they can hold nation-states to ransom in this fashion, then that's all the more reason to get rid of them.
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Re:LOL good luck with that, France (Score:4, Insightful)
and honors any rulings that an international court hands down.
You seem to think that companies who would be affected by a digital tax are international companies. I'm sure Amazon's cloud services may get Amazon s.a.r.l in some serious legal hot water if you think that this particular French company can simply ignore French law simply because it's parent organisation is American.
The reality is companies well and truly do honour rulings of international courts, which is precisely why they pay armies of lawyers to appeal rulings which don't go their way.
LOL fuck you France, we'll just pull out of your country and set up shop somewhere that doesn't suck as much as you
I want to be there when you tell your shareholders that you voluntarily abandon a market of 70million well off westerners, simply because you didn't want to pay tax on profits in that country. What's the pitch? "Hey we made $x million, but we had to pay y% tax on that so I propose next year we don't make money at all" Even better if you happen to have chosen France as your head location for your European operations like many major companies have. Then you get to tell your shareholders you not only intend to not make money next year in a market but also incur a large relocation cost.
If you want to change things so that can't happen and corporations can't get away with some of the things they get away with, then you'd more-or-less have to ban corporations from being multi-national in the first place
No you don't, you just need to write laws without profit transferring loopholes.
The west needs to do 0% corporate tax (Score:2)
Likewise, I would like to see US stats follow Texas. 1% gross sales receipt. Again, no write-offs, breaks, exemptions, etc. Just a simple 1% sales tax on everything they sell (including out of state).
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0% sounds great compared to the negative tax many large companies pay now thanks to subsidies they get.