Ireland uses lower taxes to attract companies to create jobs.
This has worked, but I wonder if the EU is going to cause another country to exit with this ruling?
Seriously, what does Ireland gain if it loses a ton a jobs due to this?
Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple
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Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who committed the "fraud"? Apple, the Irish government, or both?
The fraud is that there are many who feel no company should be able to shop around for a better tax deal and no country should be allowed to give them. This isn't about fairness but instead so that other countries don't have to correct their spending issues and can inflict the same pain on their contemporaries. Even in the US there are politicians who want to have all states implement similar taxation rules or penali…
> The fraud is that there are many who feel no company should be able to shop around for a better tax deal and no country should be allowed to give them.
That is most definitely not fraud. Fraud involves deliberate deception for unlawful gain, none of which are involved in tax shopping.
Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple
#253Good. Read how Tim Cook publicly considers Nobel economist Joeseph Stiglitz as a one who do not know what he (Stiglitz) is talking about. Eye opening. Excerpts from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/wp/2016/08/13/2016... Q: What do you say in response to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz’s comments on Bloomberg [television], where he called Apple’s profit reporting in Ireland a “fraud”? Tim Cooks answer: I did…
Apple paid taxes according to Irish laws. Is it Apple's problem that Irish law disagrees with EC agreements? (Seems to be Ireland's problem.) If people want companies to pay certain taxes, they should vote for politicians that pass laws that require companies to pay those taxes.. In any case, we should be taxing land value. That's harder to avoid: you can't hide land.
Apple is not an innocent Irish taxpayer quietly filing their forms at the local post office. They are a market leader in "tax efficient" structures involving Ireland. They knew that Ireland was in violation. They knew it better than Ireland did. Unlike actual Irish people, Apple chose Ireland for its tax law. Apple now must live with that choice.
Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple
#254[deleted]
Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple
#255Apple engage(ds) in aggressive tax planning - and they, along with FBK, Google, etc - deserve to be smacked down with a heavy bill. An effective tax rate of 0.005% - when your next door business neighbour is paying 20% - is morally wrong and damaging to society and the common good.
Morals are irrelevant in this story. Tax law is a system of rules. There should be no second arbitrary standard people (and companies) should be expected to follow.
This is not true. There's always the spirit of the law and this is checked by a group of people with that power, the juries.
Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the laws preventing incentives aren't protecting the weak they are protecting the strong. That's not entirely correct. These norms were introduced to open up nationalised markets like telecoms, mail etc, which would otherwise remain forever locked on national boundaries. This allowed an equal field for businesses across the Union. Of course, established markets tend to favor the richest players. This approach is su…
>That's not entirely correct. These norms were introduced to open up nationalised markets like telecoms, mail etc, which would otherwise remain forever locked on national boundaries. This allowed an equal field for businesses across the Union. Of course, established markets tend to favor the richest players. Well it sure helped Deutsche Telecom and PostNL(TNT), everyone else is mostly still locked within their own co…
Dude, can I politely ask you to increase the amount of commas and periods you use? Otherwise you're really hard to follow :)
> everyone else is mostly still locked within their own countries
That's not really the case. In fact, in a lot of sectors purely-national players are now the exception, not the rule. You have Portuguese building companies winning UK contracts, and French companies outsourcing to Czech companies. All that wouldn't be possible if richer countries could just lock down their markets with state subsidies. In fact, the only market where this does not happen is agriculture, which is heavily regulated and planned at the EU level.
You keep reasoning on national terms, whereas the point of the EU is to overcome those terms.
> The German taxpayer isn't really picking up the bill
The numbers respectfully disagree: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8036097.stm#start
> Because of how the Euroblock/ECB is structured most of the normal debt relief tools that would be available to a "normal" country are not available to Ireland
Not just to Ireland, to anyone. Which is really the main problem with the Euro, to be honest. There are solutions, but they need a coordinated effort by Eurozone countries to overcome German diffidence towards potentially weakening the currency. This effort is slowly building, now that France and Italy have nothing left to lose.
> they are trying to have the cake and eat it
Well, it's what everyone wants, isn't it? :)
> they have a shared currency and a monetary policy that is dictated by an external body the ECB which to be fair no one really elects
FED heads are also not elected but rather nominated; and historically they are pretty independent as well. Politically, the ECB is under a similar amount of pressure; the Governing Board is nominated by the European Council, aka national governments, and include representatives from all countries; on top of that sits a restricted Executive team which traditionally includes at least one German, one French and one Italian, recognising the larger role of their economies.
> the Irish government can't do squat
The Irish government can apply political pressure much like the governor of Alabama; the difference is that, lacking an electoral lighting rod, nobody cares too much about Alabama here. If there were such a lighting rod (a powerful elected EU President with executive powers), countries would cry about loss of sovereignty. EU economists are not the only ones wanting to eat cake, it appears :)
> The EU/Euroblock will soon figure out that they'll have to go either to a fully or at least much more federated system
Absolutely. Fiscal harmonisation is the next step on that path, and this decision is coherent with that endgame.
> India... South Africa...
Neither of those has unfettered access to the largest market on the planet. I should have probably qualified my previous statement with something like "in the EU".
> Germany would be considerably better and cheaper to operate in
You're selling Ireland short, here. Tax is one element of policy, but not the only one. I'm pretty sure US companies would rather work with Irish unions than German ones, for example. Germany is also another hour away in timezone terms, two hours in flight terms, and more uncomfortable to access by sea. And of course, everyone suffers from competition from up-and-coming countries in the same way.
Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple
#257We should cut corporate income taxes to 0%, and increase income taxes on investors and highly-paid employees to make the change revenue neutral. This will eliminate the incentive to waste resources on corporate tax avoidance and allow businesses to focus on creating customer value.
Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've got an unusual definition of "sovereignty". I'm not sure about US states (I would have thought they are considered sovereign member states of the Federation, but I haven't researched the issue), but the much less incorporated European Union certainly consists of "sovereign" states. Or was it just a linguistic shortcut for "Ireland has submitted itself under treaties and laws of the European Union"?
You're not sovereign if some other entity can micro-manage your tax policies. It's a big stretch to call U.S. states "sovereign" but even they get to decide on how they give tax breaks.
Ireland is still sovereign. They could pull out of the EU and its rules at any time if they wanted to. Is this different to delegating some aspect of trade to WTO rules?
Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ireland is hardly a scape-goat. The commission has dealt in a similar manner with Amazon in Luxembourg, Starbucks in the Netherlands, and Anheuser-Busch InBev in Belgium. Whether or not there is an agreement between Apple and Ireland or just an understanding that Ireland would not tax them on almost any income is irrelevant. The point of the matter is that the effect of the scheme has been that Apple has paid next to…
Sure, there was some news that EC has dealt with Amazon, Starbucks, InBev but did they actually pay anything back? Did they appeal? Last I heard for InBev the Belgian Finance minister said: "the consequences for the companies concerned would be considerable and the reimbursement itself would be particularly complex" aka will take forever and we will probably not really do it.
It has taken a number of years for the investigation of Apple to reach this point, and the investigations of Starbucks, Amazon, and InBev are ongoing. I don't believe your "aka" summary is accurate.
Re: Commission says Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to €13B to Apple
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
They forced Ireland to 'take one for the team' and prevent contagion by repaying bad commercial bank loans from overseas banks to the failed Irish banks. In other words they prevented Ireland from doing an Iceland. They hinted that new, shared burden, measures, to be put in place, to cover such eventualities in the future, would be applied retrospectively to Ireland but they weren't. During the bailout term the EU/EC…
Yeah it wasn't pretty. Ireland was not allowed to default on its loans which was what they should have done. It did not control its currency or banks which are effectively controlled by the ECB. It could not repay some or all of its loans with its own currency by simply printing more of it and the only way of getting more currency was taking on more loans. What people also don't understand is that the laws preventing…
Anyone who believes a loan is a subsidy either does not understand English or has never studied even the basics of economics.