This is not about taxing revenues instead of profits.
This is about taxing EU-wide profits in EU countries proportional to the revenues generated in that country.
At the moment, many big tech companies use bookkeeping tricks to make it look like all their profit is generated in, for example, Ireland, while the revenue is generated in other EU counties.
Unfortunately, Ireland has special tax rates for these companies (the legality of which is contested), so their EU-wide effective tax rate is often ~1%.
This is one of the main criticism about how the EU was made: freedom for funds goods and (mostly) workers to move around in the EU zone, without tariffs or constraints but no fiscal harmonization has been done.
Therefore countries with low taxes (Ireland but also Luxembourg) attract a disproportionate amount of big companies HQ. Ikea, for instance, is officially declared in Luxembourg.
Why so many people in EU rejoice about the Brexit is because UK has been one of the main force opposing fiscal harmonization (apparently London is a bit of a tax haven for financial service companies) so hopefully this kind of efforts can go forward.
I don't know where you got that so many people in the EU rejoice at the defection of the UK.
It is a sad state of affair that gets the rest if the EU sad and angry.
I don't see what there is to rejoice about, although I'm sure that some will see it as a benefit in some narrow way.
That's the general sentiment in France. Too often UK has used their veto to prevent some EU-wide change or to block any initiative that was not about purely trade. Most of the people who follow EU politics think that Brexit is an economical loss but a political gain.
Actually, UK was never part of the EU ( fully). I'm glad that's over now, i don't think UK will benefit on the long term and I hope the responsable politicians will be punished.
But at least the will be no more exceptions for participating members of the EU.
The EU was a good concept, but exceptions to members states ( not only UK, but also for Belgium eg. To much debt), made it a lot less usefull
Damned politicians...
Ps. This is not a rant against UK, but against the 'broken' execution of the foundations throughout the years.
Also it's time to send a clear message, you can't get the benefits of you aren't a member
The EU's worst nightmare is a successful UK post-Brexit. The general feeling amongst my friends and colleagues is that we are more than willing to put in the hard graft to make it happen. Anyone that thinks the UK will roll over is going to be disappointed.
People in the UK voted to join the EC, not the EU. British leadership (Margaret Tatcher) was very straightforward from the begining about not joining the EMU/Eurozone.
But they were in the EU, it's not about the intention of not being in. Also EC is a predecessor of the EU. It also started with the BeNeLux before that
Exceptions on joining, but not participating 100% shouldn't be allowed in the first place
Remember, people voted to join the EC, and politicians then signed the UK up to the EU without asking the people. The UK was never meant to be part of the EU. The UK & US helped start the EU to prevent Europe from falling back into war, but it was never meant to engulf the UK, who as Churchill said, is too incompatible to ever be a part of it.
In your opinion. Given the fascistic bullying of sovereign nations Hungary and Poland by Brussels for merely defending their citizens' interests, perhaps the writing is on the wall.
From polls I read, except for France, most people in the EU absolutely don't rejoice Brexit. But many - me included - think that, even if Brexit is a very sad fact, at least it could help fixing this kind of problems.
Being an economic liberal, I always thought that this was one of the main advantages of the EU. Setup shop in one country and sell to the whole single market while encouraging beneficial tax competition. I do oppose special deals for specific companies though. Ireland, please stand up to the Brussels cartel!
The problem is that it gives large multinational companies a strong competitive edge over single-national companies, and it makes tax money bleed from high-tax countries to low-tax countries. Both of these things are also self-reinforcing, accelerating the process.
(Not that I have any solutions to these problems, I'm just pointing them out. :) )
"Tax competition" is only beneficial to the rich and to smaller states that can steal taxes from bigger ones. But of course, if you oppose free schools, free healthcare, and you favor the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, I understand why you like it.
Corporate tax is one of the most damaging forms of taxation in terms of the number and size of distortions it creates in an economy and it is very damaging to national competitiveness as well. But being in favor of lower corporate tax does not preclude supporting various other wealth redistribution schemes to help the poor or reduce inequality.
If the EU is more concerned about the specific case of internet giants rather than multinational firms in general, they could tax this in a much more practical way by having state run internet service providers charge these content companies for access to their markets.
What is the advantage of tax competition? Small countries that only host headquarters can charge very low rates: they don't have most of the expenses of bigger countries, especially if they are under no military threat by their neighbors and therefore protected by them.
Yes, this is the (I think) a step in the right direction. Don't have special judgements about taxes (i.e. Apple in Ireland) because companies try to minimize the tax they pay. Actually change the laws so it's consistent for all companies.
If this system is enacted, will the benefits of staying in the EU out weigh just moving all the shell companies to the Caymans or wherever?
I wish countries would give up on corporate taxes. They are either easily circumvented, or you need a massive regulatory body to analyze all corporate transactions and determine if they are "fair."
All the same tax revenue can be gained through much better systems that are not trivially circumvented and do not create a perverse incentive for your country's companies to up and move to the nearest tax haven.
The goal is to make it pointless to use shell companies to avoid paying taxes.
> I wish countries would give up on corporate taxes.
I really wish they won't. Right now the small companies pay corporate taxes just fine, it is the big ones that play all kinds of shell games to get out from under their obligations.
You generally can't operate a running business in EU or any other country out of the Caymans. You could have share holding companies registered there but to actually run a physical business, you have to actually have a company registered in the market (or come in as a purely imported product)
Ireland works simply because it is a member of the EU and any EU HQ business can operate anywhere else in EU.
I would argue that the benefits or difficulties of avoiding taxation are dependent on the rule of law in the states where business is actually done. If the USA or EU took a political decision not to permit such structures then they would disappear.
The USA and EU don't because the benefits to their political class have so far outweighed the problems caused by a lack of revenue, and these structures have developed and proliferated rather rapidly. Additionally the political structures required to create collaborative responses have been developed in response to different issues (the necessity of supporting development in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the wall), and the alignments necessary to operate a larger system in Europe are not yet in place.
I do believe that Brexit will facilitate this, but I think that the process will have to go further to include Macron's ideas on a single budget - a greatly expanded take and disperse for the EU. This will require a huge reform of the Commission. I invite everyone to try and engage with the commission in some process or other and then judge what kind of capability you are engaging with.
I hope that the EU will devolve the distribution of central budget items to locally accountable forums, possibly at the sub national level - perhaps six for a country like France, one for somewhere like Greece. Currently I fear that the favour networks that operate in the EU institutions would greatly distort and corrupt any large fiscal rebalancing.
The big issue is that it seems that several of the national level structures in the EU would creak in the face of this kind of new set-up. Spain and Belgium in particular, but even Italy could be pulled apart by the creation of subnational entities with revenue lines independent of the national entity. Also, what would the mechanism of accountability be ? I think that this should vary according to the tradition of the region, but what are the acceptable limits or bounds on this?
Without Brexit this is simply a non-starter, I think that the UK would have been much more compromised than any other EU state by the emergence of this kind of structure, and I think that the English part of the UK would have been a real problem in terms of subnational accountability - the sovereignty of the commons would have gone and I don't see that as politically possible in England (note the other nations are less touchy about that for some reason!)
As I understand it, there is also some monkey business related to patents. Something like this: Apple sells its patents to Apple Ireland for a dollar. Then they pay "royalties" to Apple Ireland everytime they sell an iPhone. I can't confirm where I read this.
The most powerful politician in the EU - Jean-Claude Juncker - is personally responsible (not by himself, of course) for setting up these sorts of structures, and making sure they stay in place [1].
A quote from [1]:
"The president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, spent years in his previous role as Luxembourg’s prime minister secretly blocking EU efforts to tackle tax avoidance by multinational corporations, leaked documents reveal."
So:
> I think a lot of tax agencies simply don't have the muscle to push forward on this
No. They do. They're just prevented from doing so by the "socialists" (hah !) Europe "elected" (just pointing out that the leadership of the EU commission, the only organisation with real law-giving power in the EU aren't directly elected at all).
1.Have multiple subsidiaries of the same company in different countries.
2.Give intellectual property rights to one company in one country with low taxation like Ireland or a state like Maryland.
3. Make all the subsidiaries pay arbitrary patent-copyright-trademark rights to the company in Ireland-Maryland-Singapur so all the profits become zero in the different countries while transferring all those profits away.
And the guy who helped set that up - and personally made it worse by making custom tax deals for several multinationals - is now the head of the EU commission !
Many American companies (including most or all YC startups) do the same, incorporating in the low-tax state of Delaware for favourable tax treatment even though the company's offices and bulk of revenue-generation are elsewhere.
I don't think this is correct. It is more about case-law and the legal support system for companies in delaware. I do not believe the companies are taxed based on which state they are incorporated in. The exception is the franchise tax fee, which is a nominal amount even to a company with only six figures of revenue.
Keep in mind we're the last effectively communist country in the world, I'm not surprised in the least to see corporate taxes up there with the "banana republics" gp was talking about. "Social" money has to come from somewhere!
We have extremely influential labor unions, the public sector is a leading job provider (even a majority employer in some areas), healthcare and a lot of infrastructure is nationalised, huge welfare programs, free public education for all...
But most importantly to the (joke) argument that we're the last communist country there's a massive popular adhesion to the points listed above and for some reason a deep seated mistrust of the wealthy.
I mean, you only have to look at pretty much every wealthy person to see why they would have a mistrust of them. Even guys who are doing good things now, like Bill Gates, didn't get wealthy by acting like nice people.
As for the communist thing, ah I didn't realize it was a joke argument, thought it was a serious one
Yes but iirc France has a system of tax credits that reduce the liability for large companies especially.
You can deduct 7% from those 33% from the payroll tax credit alone as long as you pay your workers more than the minimum wage.
Delaware doesn't have unusually friendly for business courts. It mostly just has a lot of established case law. It's cheaper for businesses when they know where the lines are on most laws because of previous cases and rulings. Ambiguity is more expensive than the level of bias in most legal situations.
California corporate law is much worse than that of Delaware. Corporations are taxed by every state where they have to register to do business. For every corporation with a California HQ, that certainly includes the Golden State.
Corporations, such as Microsoft, which are headquartered in states with nicer bodies of corporate law frequently choose to incorporate in their home state, such as Washington.
It depends how you define profit, and to me this is absolutely about taxing revenues instead of profit.
I see profit as the 'value added' by a particular activity. At least 90% of the value created by Google, Facebook and Apple was created in California. Therefore the vast majority of worldwide income generated by these companies should be subject to the tax rates that apply in California - not Ireland, not Germany, not Spain. So Google, etc should be paying more tax - but they should be paying it to the US government, not the EU. If there is ever an EU Silicon Valley then the EU can tax the worldwide profit of those EU companies.
Personally I would like to see a rule that intellectual property is fixed to the place where it is produced and forever taxed in that jurisdiction - just like land. If you write a book or develop a new drug or software then that IP stays where it was developed.
> At least 90% of the value created by Google, Facebook and Apple was created in California.
I'm trying not to be snarky but I need to say wtf.
FB & google don't make money from IP, they make money as service providers, connecting merchants on the advertisement hype train to our eyeballs.
They take money from local and transnational businesses, and present ads, aggregation and search services to individual, local, users.
How is this California related profits when I see ads for $smallbusiness in my french town? Because they host the servers there? Please. To be fair I'd concede Amazon may be different with regards to where the value they create resides but I'm sure you'll feel the same way I do when the tech giants step away from Silicon valley and it looses the sweet sweet techmonies.
This not about IP rights, corporate liberties or socialism, it's about realising when you're defending the fire that's roasting you. 'Cause google and fb don't give a F about US vs EU further than how they can leverage them to lower operating costs.
Was it the farmer or the field? The fella that used to farm here wasn't so efficient or modern, but he paid the lord of the manors tithe, the new person is growing lots of new things, she's selling them cheap in the market.
Her toys are nicer than the family who live at the manor have ever seen, let alone owned.
She's kind of a loud mouth, keeps telling the peasants and the Baronial family that they need to change, that their ideas about life, culture and fairness are all wrong.
How does this story end.?We note that the Barons have swords, pikes, bows and arrows, a long track record of setting fire to houses and decorating them by hanging up the occupants. Perhaps though, this time, they'll simply chillax and go to the seminars that the new woman is running.
If they use option a. I expect that the next peasant in charge of the farm will be much less ostentatious, opinionated and will adopt all of the shiny new practices introduced by the last farmer. They probably won't invent many new ones... but then again are there lots of new ones to be invented now?
What value do facebook developers create directly? They have crafted a network of complementary services for which I don't deny their craftsmanship, but would you argue the developers are the core business instead of the interaction between users and their product?
> A French court ruled in July French court ruled that Google, now part of Alphabet Inc, was not liable to pay 1.1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) in back taxes because it had no “permanent establishment” in France and ran its operations there from Ireland.
How strange. I didn't know Google were an Irish company. I see them when I connect to the internet from all over the world.
It looks like Airbnb also have their EMEA HQ there, as do Apple, eBay, Facebook, IBM, HP, ..., ...
I guess there must be a really big internet market in Ireland for all those guys to be focused on that location, right?
On another note, I tried to pay my taxes through an off-shore location, but I quickly realised I would get jail time for tax evasion.
The problem with a person doing this style of tax avoidance is that the barrier to entrance is much higher than the gain.
Assuming general principals of US tax law, if you're already working as an independent contractor, you could legally set up a local company and an overseas company, have the local company bill the client, pay you a reasonable amount, and pay the overseas company the remainder for the use of its name (or whatever justification you like).
Your local company would have no net income, but may pay employer side taxes on your wages, and any minimum taxes on corporations in the local jurisdiction.
Your overseas company would have a net income, but you picked an overseas jurisdiction with low taxes, right?
You would have recognized income of the wages, and unrecognized capital gains in the overseas company. At such time as you take the money from the overseas company, that would be recognized as a capital gain.
At the end of the day, you have to run two companies, one in an unfamiliar jurisdiction, and you get to defer recognition of income and change the character of the income from normal income to capital gains. You may also have paid taxes to the overseas jurisdiction that I'm not sure qualifies for a foreign tax credit. It's a real gain, but it may not outweigh the costs.
If you're a direct employee of a company, it's also not an option, since you can't redirect your wages out of your recognized income.
You're right that it is a lot of hassle, but you're also missing the fact that it's a lot easier for Google to defend itself to the IRS than for you to do so. The amount Google would need to pay lawyers, in that case, is so much smaller than what they save on taxes, that it makes perfect sense for them. The opposite is true for you. For example, the IRS will probably call you on your name licensing trick and charge you with tax evasion. Even if you could afford to defend yourself, you'd probably lose the case.
Also, I'm not an expert on the subject, but I seem to recall reading that in some countries, corporate tax tricks like that don't work for one-person companies. It depends on how many full-time employees the company has.
I think it's ridiculous that big megacorps can eliminate huge parts of their tax burden while the regular Joe cannot. The system is overly complex and tilted in the favor of the rich and large companies. That's not what the people agreed to when they accepted a taxation system during and following the first world war.
Yes, if you're making $50k a year. But not if you're an entrepreneur pulling in $1m a year. Everything involving intellectual property rights is generally very fluid and easy to move around.
A smaller scale example would be living life as a perpetual traveller°: an internet based entrepreneur who makes $200k a year and bases him/herself in a jurisdiction that does not tax income. Or who travels around between countries to avoid tax.
Instead of paying 40% tax on $200k (= $80k gone, poof) you put that in your pocket and use that to pay for travel expenses. "Going into tax exile" essentially ends up paying for itself, and then some. That is why companies (and individuals) participate in tax avoidance.
°: exception; this doesn't apply to Americans. You get to pay US taxes wherever you reside, above a certain income threshold.
How does this apply to other countries? Aren't you supposed to get residence in some country before losing the residence connection of your original country?
That being said, there are countries with loose taxation like Thailand where you can establish residence and avoid taxes as long as you are not operating in the country itself.
Not really, but it's better to have official residency somewhere, though. Some countries are quite flexible on residency, however. Cyprus offers residency after spending 60 days per year in the country, and exempts foreign income from tax. In Malta you can get residency by paying €20k a year (no requirement to spend any time in the country), and foreign income is also exempt from tax, etc.
> That being said, there are countries with loose taxation like Thailand where you can establish residence and avoid taxes as long as you are not operating in the country itself.
I believe you can run foreign companies from Thailand without having to pay tax there, as they have no CFC laws. So the example the poster above gave basically applies, but you would book all your income in ForeignCo and take a small salary in the Thai company from fees you charge ForeignCo. That's essentially a zero tax country then.
Panama also does not tax foreign income. I worked remotely from Panama for many years and it was lovely. My take home salary was better than what could be achieved working for the likes of Google or Facebook, stock compensation not considered. I met my wife there too. But the threshold to get residency is higher.
Not true at all. Canada, for example, taxes your worldwide income.
USA and Eritrea are unique in that they will tax your worldwide income even if you no longer live in those countries (are non-resident.) No other countries in the world have the brass balls to do that.
>USA and Eritrea are unique in that they will tax your worldwide income even if you no longer live in those countries (are non-resident.) No other countries in the world have the brass balls to do that.
But to be fair there is a rather large exemption, around US$ 100,000 per year, the nuisance is that you have to file some tax forms anyway:
>The Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE, using IRS Form 2555) allows you to exclude a certain amount of your EARNED income from US tax. For tax year 2016 (filing in 2017) this exclusion was $101,300.
Yeah, you're right. It comes back to the USA is special. There's a lot of things it gets away with that other countries could not. There are benefits to being #1.
Only if you are resident in Canada. A lot of countries do that. The USA will tax you even if you aren't resident as long as you have at least a green card or other immigrant visa.
How many people are collecting income from a full time job while living in Canada anyways? Doesn't foreign income (vs. say capital gains) generally imply non residency?
Not if you have an internet business of some kind, or work remotely for a foreign company. But if you do that, you're a schmuck to live in a country with a high tax rate. You can double your income, which means your savings rate probably goes up 600% or more, just by moving to a country that does not tax foreign income. How much faster can you pay off your mortgage under those conditions? How much faster can you retire?
It's not quite as magical as it seems though. If you retire in your 40s because of doing that, you'll need a lot more savings than you would at 65.
Directors of Canadian companies who are living abroad is probably one example.
Also, people who, say, commute from CA to the US on a daily basis will generally be exempt from Canadian taxes because the work is performed in the US (just an example, I have no idea whether you can commute from CA -> US on a daily basis)
Well, I was "taxed" on my Chinese income, but never paid a dime. Foreign tax credits and foreign income exclusions mean most of us pay nothing (well, we pay Chinese taxes, just not US taxes).
That is because there is a cost associated with renouncing US citizenship. You'll get hit with an exit tax on all your assets, making it extremely painful. The US really does not want you to renounce, because then they can no longer tax your global income.
They essentially punish wealthy people (financially) for renouncing.
You actually don't have to prove anything, you just state that you paid taxes and how much you paid (if taking a foreign tax credit). As for rebate, that is something else, meaning those taxes were already withheld by the IRS for some reason.
The scheme you are suggesting is money laundering. The reason it might work for some big names is that those have stronger reasons to bill the off-shore jurisdictions.
For example, a Starbucks LLC in "NewTown","Small-EU-Country" is fine billing an "off-shore" company for the use of Starbucks name.
The same is not fine if you are opening a local coffee shop.
His example wasn't perfect. But say you create an app. You can definitely hold those intellectual property rights (+ sell it on the App Store) through a foreign company.
Different countries have different laws to combat the use of foreign companies, though. It might end up not being worth it because there are other costs associated with setting up an entity (e.g. some substance requirements)
No, the intent of the law is absolutely unmistakeable especially in tax-related domains.
Bad-faith actors don't deserve the statutory crevices through which they divert their accounting. Fix the moral compass of their boards and officers or assign them a post-facto "we really don't like what you did there" penalty. Could be a fine, business restriction or mandatory supervision by the public authorities.
The notion that these companies should only be beholden to the strictest letter of the law is nonsensical.
> The notion that these companies should only be beholden to the strictest letter of the law is nonsensical.
Right, they should be beholden to the letter when it benefits them and the spirit when it benefits them. Seriously -- you wouldn't want to live in a world where this isn't the case.
* Nobody should have a technicality in the letter result in fines and punishment when they were following the spirit in earnest.
* Similarly, nobody who takes care to follow the letter exactly should be punished even if it violates the spirit. Because otherwise people and companies have no clear way to know what is and isn't allowed.
It's only when someone is violating both the letter and the spirit that there are grounds for punishment.
Yes that argument makes sense for rational actors, but I believe some privte organisations are simply too well adapted to the sane model for it to be effectively usable to mitigate their bad actions.
I'd argue corporations specifically could do with some more fear of the stick, in the cases where they fall in a grey area.
I think that all relies on a lot of judgement and perspective. I think that the way to fix things is to shrink down (or expand) the letter of the law so as to catch the corner cases and to protect people appropriately (from the application of the law).
I think that the letter of the law must be applied generously and sparingly - but the rapid expansion of egregious evasion should be addressed because it is having corrosive social effects that will compromise this attitude and the norms that underpin it.
Avoidance, you mean. I think there are more distorting effects in the market at the moment than tax avoidance, such as extremely low interest rates and quantitative easing (outside of the US).
Yes - agree, sorry sloppy language. I agree that both of the other distortions are important and difficult too - but I think imposed on authorities by circumstance.
Also having other things in play doesn't mean that this thing shouldn't be fixed...
Yes, agree, but I just think in many cases the resources and effort it requires for tax authorities to win these cases often makes it not worth it.
A full tax case can easily run for 5 to 10 years, and the upside will be relatively limited. A lot has already been done in recent years and for a lot of EU companies the actual tax rate they pay has gone up with a few percentage points. But now most of the low hanging fruit is gone.
1) Reading newspapers and watching the news gives me the impression that there are large numbers of people who are not happy with the current social contract.
2) Speaking to people in and outside of my community informs me that there are many people who are not happy with the current social contract.
The line of reasoning I have is that there are simple ways that could readjust the flow of revenue and capital to enable the removal of many of the perceived injustices that other people cite when I speak with them or read of their experiences.
Just like corporations, people don't actually end up in jail because they don't act morally. They end up in jail because they don't act within the boundaries of the law.
There are plenty of rich assholes out there who would screw people over on a deal (for example, one well known New York real estate developer..)
It's one of those things where either everyone has to do it, or no one does. Nobody wants to be the first schmuck to pay higher taxes while allowing the competition to accummulate larger cash reserves and gain better margin flexibility.
The grandparent would be eligible to pay taxes at off-shore locations if he had any income generated at those off-shore locations. The IRS would treat that as foreign income and the first $100,800 of it might qualify for exclusion https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...
Yes - it must be this way round. If there is a clear level playing field then things will sort themselves out in the medium term. While there's a lot of nonsense and confusion bad outcomes will arise.
Not a tax advice or whatever. No idea if this works, but at the very least it seems like it used to. Do your own research. Just my 2c.
Here's what you can do. Be self-employed in a certain EU country. Have a company (or any other structure, hell, make it a non-profit if you want). The company finds clients, pays you for the work, bills the clients etc. Since you are self-employed you choose the flat exemption (wouldn't want self-employed people to worry about paperwork :D), so you are only taxed on 40% of your revenue. This works out to about 12% including healthcare, etc. The company pays you exactly the maximum limit for the tax exemption, invests the rest into whatever you want, nice office, job training, business trips (i.e. vacation), ends up with 0 profit.
Depending on the country where your clients are, you might be forced to pay a some taxes there, but eh, you can live with that.
Perhaps EU laws have complicated things here, by making it easy to operate in other EU countries without establishing, yet not having changed tax laws accordingly? (Merely speculation.)
> On another note, I tried to pay my taxes through an off-shore location, but I quickly realised I would get jail time for tax evasion.
There is nothing wrong with establishing an off-shore company and paying taxes there (or not paying).
Don't confuse company/yourself. Even if you do the off-shore scheme, you'll need to pay taxes for the income you repatriate. It is a good idea, however, if you want to save/invest money without it getting sodomized by yearly taxes.
Someone needs to start a company that offers transfer pricing as a service. Sign up and get a physical address, subsidiary corporations, bank accounts and even employees & board members in Ireland. Much of this can be shared infrastructure of course. If tax avoidance is going to be legal for the big guys, why not make it accessible to everyone?
At Google's level, transfer pricing is a negotiation game with tax authorities. Having that many employees based in Ireland helps Google's case for routing more revenue through a double-Irish arrangement and making profits disappear.
There are tons of financial firms that will set it up for you on a consulting basis. Here in the bay area, Duff & Phelps work with a lot of the big tech companies. Don't know of anyone who's automated the process or turned it into a SAAS product yet (for obvious reasons).
I find the whole system lame. I feel web giants of today are not making the web better, just different, more structured and massive. Instead of taxing them to grab a share of their earnings (whether it makes sense or not), I'd be happier if more people would write longer and denser web page as it was until the late 90s. Give incentives for people to produce.
Even in US there is only one Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc. It seems like these global monopolies are a new phenomenon that requires to rethink past economic ideas.
Yes, it is new because it is global, Rockefeller was a local phenomenon. Before you have monopolies per country and now these monopolies (or call them as you want) are centralized in US.
There is room for innovation in taxation. We need new smart taxation for information economy.
Taxing network externalizes and economic barriers for entry for example. Taxation could be used as natural pressure to correct market failures. Taxing revenue is not what EU countries propose, but it could be viable solution.
Thinking aloud: If company has market share of X% of the population it pays tax from the revenue related to X. If retail company that has 30% market share pays 0.3% extra from its revenue compared to tiny company with just 10,000 customers, it would probably be enough to even out the field and limit barriers to entry.
> Taxation could be used as natural pressure to correct market failures.
Taxation isn't natural.
By the way, I'd like to remind everyone: when the state taxes something, the state now depends on that thing for its budget.
> If retail company that has 30% market share pays 0.3% extra from its revenue compared to tiny company with just 10,000 customers, it would probably be enough to even out the field and limit barriers to entry.
If you are really interested in barriers to entry, you can do a thought-experiment (or a real experiment): try to start a business. See where the friction is. And then ask yourself what the barriers were.
Another thought-experiment: imagine if starting and running a business (which includes collecting revenue, paying employees, paying taxes, abiding by the law) were nearly zero-friction. If starting a business had very low artificial friction, then there would _actually_ be natural pressure against market incumbents.
I run business in Finland and pay high taxes. Friction is not the taxes. If it were, I would have moved my business to Estonia long time ago, it's just few hours away. I could do it over internet in few hours and start within days.
There are different ways for countries compete as "business platforms". I'm not saying that some way is better than another, what I'm saying is that there are different strategies that can work.
High taxes in Nordic countries work as form of evolutionary pressure. They harm low-tech low education requirement jobs and businesses. They drive them to China and to the third world. They help high-tech companies and skilled workers, because taxes pay for great education, safety nets general well-being.
Within US different states have different strategies. High-tech hubs seem to tax more and provide more just like Nordic countries. Some states choose to compete with low regulation low pay jobs against Mexico, China and India. Good luck with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_tax_levels_in_the_United...
I think you've vastly confused cause and effect. Rich economies can afford high tax rates because they are rich, and poor economies have to compete for what businesses they can get.
Another obvious confounder is that richer states tend to be more urban, and urban places tend to be more liberal. Which vote for higher tax rates and social programs. Rural states are more conservative which favor smaller governments. This is just an effect of political demographics, not a cause of superior tax policies.
Systematic investment to education and infrastructure have provided the tools to become a rich economy. Becoming rich country with low level taxation is possible only for countries with lots of natural resources, like oil.
Governments in most rich countries today are vastly larger than a century ago. American in particular was basically an extreme libertarian system until relatively recent times. These countries were already rich, or well on their way to becoming so, when their governments bloated up. Rich societies cause big governments, not the other way around.
Additionally, things like education and infrastructure are a tiny fraction of government spending (although they tend to keep growing despite not getting any better.) Almost no one disagrees that the government should fund those things. That's not where the vast majority of your high taxes are going.
Systematic investment to education provides new enrollees for MIT and Stanford and, subsequently, workforce for Apple and Google. Brain drain is a real problem for developing countries.
Also sex, sex is inherent to society. As is friendship, as are stable child rearing agreements (spartan or catholic - I'm not dictating, but you do need something to get babies to productivity).
Let's not minimize those, or poetry or theatre.
Your moral equivalence is not mine, perhaps other like you are a majority or even a significant minority, but perhaps not. In any case I think that for a functional society my equivalence has a higher utility.
I agree with a well funded government. I don't always agree with how government spends the money, but that is kind of the point. Governments should guarantee a minimum standard and equal starting conditions for everyone, capitalism raise the roof. Both are vital.
I wonder what the impact will be on these companies' ability to compete against entrenched players in those EU countries. For example, will this make Amazon's prices non-competitive with European bricks-and-mortar retailers?
I also wonder what the impact will be on their stock prices, because taxes on top-line revenues have a disproportionate impact on profit margins. For example, a 5% tax on revenues would render Amazon unprofitable in the EU and would cut Google's 20%+ net profit margin by about a quarter in the region.
Finally, if this goes through, will other jurisdictions around the world follow?
Currently these giants have to pay less than bricks-and-mortar retailers[1], which is why the system is unfair. Amazon pays less taxes on a book sold than a small 1-person shop across the street. Until very recently, they didn't pay
taxes in some countries at all [2]
"...will this make Amazon's prices non-competitive"
Amazon UK book prices are mostly full-price outside of the bestseller lists. It's been like this for a while (but it wasn't of course how Amazon started). So you could argue their prices are already non-competitive for many books. It doesn't seems to matter though since all their rivals (who undercut Amazon book prices) are on Amazon marketplace anyway, so Amazon still gets a cut of the sale. Win-win for Amazon.
If you are in the UK, wordery.com is often a cheaper alternative than Amazon for many books. So is bookdepository.com, which is ironic given that it is owned by Amazon.
> “The amounts raised would aim to reflect some of what these companies should be paying in terms of corporate tax,” the ministers said in the letter, first reported on by the Financial Times.
The idea of a revenue tax of course contradicts the stated justifications for existing taxes on business: the funding of ephemeral services which contribute indirectly to the business's revenue.
Google benefits from approximately no government infrastructure in France, Germany, Italy, or Spain, but they want to get their grubby hands on it nonetheless.
They benefit from having the market; the entire set of infrastructure and society that makes it possible to make money there. Google has no divine right to sell into that market without taxes or tariffs any more than European companies have to sell into the US.
The government is not the market, the people are the market. If the government is in the business of selling the public to multinational corporations, something is truly wrong.
(Yes, that's a joke in French, but I'm not really about to type a treatise on popular sovereignty in the Spanish constitution for two reasons. Firstly I'm on a phone, and secondly I know nothing about it)
I do wish one day we could have a discussion that didn't have to argue the existence of gonvernment and taxation from first principles, but today is not that day.
A tax on Spanish and French revenues is a tax on Spanish and French consumption, which is already charged. If it is advertising revenue, then the tax will be charged on the advertised products and services and likely also on the charges to the advertisers.
L'état, c'est certains d'entre nous!
> I do wish one day we could have a discussion that didn't have to argue the existence of gonvernment and taxation from first principles, but today is not that day.
I'm not arguing for or against taxation as a whole in any sense, with or without first principles. I'm arguing that this particular instantiation does not fit the justifications for the existing tax regime, and serves no purpose but to increase the price of services to the people in these countries (and in order to fund something which has not even been defined).
This taxation, not part of law in any of these countries, is effectively a transaction tax. If the goal is to discourage transactions, then well, go ahead and levy it. Pat yourself on the back knowing that your citizens are doing less business and more of their money is going to the state for whatever purpose the state sees fit.
The money that goes to the state in taxes is spent by the state on services provided by the citizens of the state. The alternative is the money going to a tax haven bank account of a multinational. Pat yourself on the back knowing that your citizens are doing less business and more of their money is going to the multinational for whatever purpose the multinational sees fit.
> Google benefits from approximately no government infrastructure in France, Germany, Italy, or Spain
They directly depend on the infrastructure to reach their customers. And they indirectly depend on the people having a high standard of living which also requires infrastructure. If your country is a 3rd-world shithole without infrastructure you'll have a very hard time selling your products which sit high on maslow's hierarchy.
Which infrastructure? What infrastructure in France, Germany, Italy, or Spain, which is used by Google to reach their customers, is built and/or maintained by the governments of those countries?
Not sure I understand the question. Isn't that "most of it"?
I use a road to get to work. My work pay my salary. My salary pays amazon for crap delivered to my house. The package comes delivered on the same road. The internet connection I used to visit amazons page is delivered via fiber to my house, funded just like other infrastructure.
So the road and fiber was very important for my society being a developed high-income one, which is why I'm buying crap from the internet in the first place.
All of those things you mentioned are already paid by somebody: the customer pays for your broadband and couriers pay for roads thorough their revenue taxes and tolls.
However, the topic here is the indirect benefit of being a wealthy nation where you can have customers wealthy enough to care about your products in the first place. The argument is that this is the result of something the society or the government did and it whoever benefits from that must pay their share for the access to that benefit, possibly to keep or improve the conditions that lead that wealth in the first place.
Infrastructure is a precondition for high economic activity and wealth. Without wealth Google, Amazon would have few customers in Germany, France, Spain.
These countries have mostly tax financed universities free or only with nominal tuitions for students. Without such education system the internet companies would have few customers wealthy enough to create a lot of profit for the company.
The legal system and independent courts etc are an infrastructure it depends on - Google had to leave China due to problems with the local legal system
Google has to leave china for political reasons. The legal system rather is incredibly malleable to the needs of officials (lots of Chinese internet companies are allowed to ignore laws that foreign companies are not).
For example schools, hospitals, roads. They are mostly public in maybe every single European state. Without them there are no literate healthy customers and no deliveries.
Got it, so if a French person is on vacation in the US the businesses they frequent should also pay French taxes since that person is apparently only able to exist by the grace of the French government.
What happens is that a French person on vacation in the USA pays US taxes, for example the state tax on what s/he buys. S/he starts paying French taxes again when going back home. It looks fair.
But if that US business goes to France and sells to French customers there, then it should pay French taxes in France on the profits made from French customers. All loopholes should be removed.
What happens is that corporate taxes ultimately come from the pockets of customers. Either those companies will raise prices or lower their profits. Either way this will help local companies that currently can't exploits loopholes to pay no taxes and are at an unfair disadvantage. Somebody could see it as protectionism, I think the existence of those loopholes is a bug that has to be fixed.
So you can take Googles content, intellectual property, or patents and do what you like? France, Germany, Italy or Spain law enforcement wont do anything?
This is one of the key infrastructure that government provides and Google depends.
No, their courts are guided by treaty to expose citizens to action on the patents of other countries, just as courts in other countries are guided by those same treaties to expose theirs.
As far as I understand, all treaties of this sort are bilateral.
That would be exactly true. If your business's operating legal presence were in space, or on the open ocean, then you would pay no taxes, aside from consumption-side taxes in the countries you serve.
So what I'm hearing is that if you operate a website that is accessible to any person in France you should get a bill from the French government since you benefited from their infrastructure.
And Netflix should probably be getting billed from Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, L3, WOW, etc. too since they can only access their customers through their infrastructure.
We're talking about taxation here. If you're generating profits there you're probably going to have to pay taxes, yes. But of course you're just deliberately misunderstanding.
They do benefit from using the network infrastructure, but I sort of agree with you that this is just money grabbing to make up for ever increasing government expenditures. If they do it to the tech giants they'll do it to everyone else. This is an experiment, just like Cyprus was with taking sums in excess of 100k euros out of people's accounts.
When Google or Apple declares losses in Spain having record revenues so they have fiscal benefits when that country has a very big crisis then we have a big problem.
But hey, those countries ajust want to get their grubby hand in those poor companies.
> just want to get their grubby hand in those poor companies
I find it fascinating that such emotive language is used. Taxation is pretty much the least "grubby" hand a government has (military: give us all your stuff, legislature: do all our work for us, we will tell you what we think adequate compensation is); and these companies are not only not poor, they are among the richest on the planet and they got almost all of that wealth this century.
But why won't anyone think of those poor, starving, unemployed, multi billion dollar international corporations? :P
Google is not responsible for the corrupt and decadent governments in countries they don't operate out of; they're hardly responsible for it where they do operate. When China manipulates the markets so much that they collapse, and when Sweden spends its way into poverty, it will not be Google's fault, nor their responsibility to pay for it.
Decadent? I take issue. Google, like virtually every large corporation in the world, spends a significant amount of time and resources finding the optimal way to pay the least amount of taxes, through loopholes, borderline or actually illegal schemes, lobbying etc. We're supposed to blame the countries for being defrauded in this way, not the multinationals doing the defrauding? Come off it.
You want to do business in a country, you abide by the laws of that country. Governments serve their citizens and their interests. Whatever is convenient for corporations has (or should have) _zero_ bearing on any decisions. In true liberal style: if they don't like the rules they're welcome to go elsewhere.
I view tax codes like buggy software, lawful tax minimisation like zero day exploits — only difference is that the law is not above itself, so if the tax loophole is legal, then it's legal.
That said, just because something is legal doesn't make it moral, but even though I think we agree on that, I'd have to argue loopholes are totally in the domain of legislators to fix — if I understand correctly, UK law requires tax payers to report any minimisation schemes they are party to. Does that have teeth? I don't know, but it's a thought.
That's not a wholly correct interpretation. Law codes aren't rigorous; there's room for "interpreting" the law, and what really matters in the end is intent ("spirit of the law" > "letter of the law"). At any rate, the news is about "patching" the exploits.
I view corporations as non-human intelligences, so while it's totally unethical for a human to manipulate the law to their own ends, it's also something I expect corporations to perceive as acceptable, in as much as that makes sense (they will not shun each other for it) and in much the way we humans generally agree it's wrong to kill but we don't shun people for amputations or appendectomies.
This is why I prefer democratic corporations, rare as they are, to pure capitalist ones — at least the metaphorical appendix has a vote.
> Are you saying that Apple or Google don't operate in Spain or France?
While technically they do have offices in Spain and France, they are mainly service offices. The critical operations of Google are carried out in the United States, and to a (far) lesser extent, Canada, Japan, and various other places.
> What the heck has to do your claim of Spain or France being corrupt with Apple or Google declaring losses with record revenues?
It's called expenditure, the vast majority of the wealth Apple and Google generate involves spending a lot of the wealth they made in the past. This is explicitly protected by the tax codes of basically any nation worth doing business in.
Spain, for example, has a rather meh economy, meanwhile the state is funneling public funds into things like a concentrated solar plant which will probably never generate more revenue than expenditure. If not corrupt, then that is at least decadent.
> Spain, for example, has a rather meh economy, meanwhile the state is funneling public funds into things like a concentrated solar plant which will probably never generate more revenue than expenditure. If not corrupt, then that is at least decadent.
I recommend you sit down, evaluate what you are saying, and try to figure out what on earth that has to do with corporate taxing.
You don't agree with a project that a government is developing, so it's not legitimate for them to tax corporations. That's the only connection I can see.
> meanwhile the state is funneling public funds into things like a concentrated solar plant which will probably never generate more revenue than expenditure.
Erm the state isn't a for-profit entity, in fact if it were to generate a profit for some reason and didn't use that money to improve infrastructure and the living conditions of the people it represents then it would've stopped serving its purpose.
It doesn't matter that their investment doesn't generate revenue, it will improve the lives of the people it represents.
EU really needs to get into a fiscal and political union like India or the US instead of their current mish mash. That will take care of both tax gaming like this and stuff like refusal to take haircut on bad Greece debt to prop up the balance sheets of German and French banks.
This is about taxing EU-wide profits in EU countries proportional to the revenues generated in that country.
At the moment, many big tech companies use bookkeeping tricks to make it look like all their profit is generated in, for example, Ireland, while the revenue is generated in other EU counties.
Unfortunately, Ireland has special tax rates for these companies (the legality of which is contested), so their EU-wide effective tax rate is often ~1%.