291–300 of 436 posts
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>Morals are irrelevant in this story. ah, the capitalist angle. unfortunately, the consequences of acting this way are poor for the rest of society.
Change the laws to suit the morals most have.
I only wish that countries would compete for people the same way they compete for businesses. If they were to provide the best services, quality of life, in exchange for the lowest income taxes. That way people would move there and companies would follow. Wishful thinking?
It's always the Achiles' Heel of the One Simple Trick that laissez-faire capitalists continually propose: that the world is more messy and complicated than: make countries = businesses.
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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…
The situation is more complicated than that (IANAL or etc.) The majority of people in Ireland, and the Irish government, had no desire for any kind of sovereign default, and the majority of the Irish bank debt had already been (foolishly) covered by the Irish state on its own initiative. There was still a significant residuum of subordinated bank debt which the Irish taxpayer was forced to bail out as part of the Troika package, though. (Allegedly this was mainly Timmy Geithner's doing, by the way.) The irony is that come 2016 the EU is now trying to prevent the Italian government from bailing out sub debtors in the Italian banks.
The other irony is that TFEU really doesn't prohibit member state IMF access or sovereign defaults at all. In fact it's basically set up to make sovereign default the only safety valve in the Euro area; it was generally understood as specifically prohibiting any form of EU or ECB "bailout" of EU sovereigns. It was only after the fact, when Greece and Ireland were headed for trouble, that the EU member state governments decided that they didn't like the idea of member state defaults after all, and began to interpose themselves between the IMF and those countries. It was only then that the Euro really became a fiscal/monetary/financial rat-trap with no adjustment mechanisms for struggling countries.
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Two questions: 1. How do they target these companies? 2. Is this the issue then? If it was for all the companies, with no exceptions, would that be allowed? I'm seriously asking in the hope to get a better understanding, because right now, the way I see it is: As long as they are not breaking any laws, it's their "right" to use any loophole there is, to minimize their taxes (or maximize their profit, depends how you…
It is Ireland's "right" to tax companies however they want, just as it's the company's "right" to configure itself to minimize it's tax exposure. Both of these are entirely ethical. The EU sees dollar signs for its budgets when it imagines how to charge Apple a few billion in fees. Simple as that.
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Two questions: 1. How do they target these companies? 2. Is this the issue then? If it was for all the companies, with no exceptions, would that be allowed? I'm seriously asking in the hope to get a better understanding, because right now, the way I see it is: As long as they are not breaking any laws, it's their "right" to use any loophole there is, to minimize their taxes (or maximize their profit, depends how you…
It is Ireland's "right" to tax companies however they want, just as it's the company's "right" to configure itself to minimize it's tax exposure. Both of these are entirely ethical. The EU sees dollar signs for its budgets when it imagines how to charge Apple a few billion in fees. Simple as that.
People here are commenting on Ireland (and other jurisdictions) engaging in tax arbitrage to attract companies and jobs. Competing on tax rates and negotiating tax deals were a huge MNC like Apple pays a ridiculous 0.005% is bad: morally wrong, cuts to public services, increases unjustifiable economic inequality and is just not fair on other much smaller firms who have to pay full whack on the tax. Apple, FBK, etc do…
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Two questions: 1. How do they target these companies? 2. Is this the issue then? If it was for all the companies, with no exceptions, would that be allowed? I'm seriously asking in the hope to get a better understanding, because right now, the way I see it is: As long as they are not breaking any laws, it's their "right" to use any loophole there is, to minimize their taxes (or maximize their profit, depends how you…
It is Ireland's "right" to tax companies however they want, just as it's the company's "right" to configure itself to minimize it's tax exposure. Both of these are entirely ethical. The EU sees dollar signs for its budgets when it imagines how to charge Apple a few billion in fees. Simple as that.
What Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and most other big US company do is the so called "double Irish"[1]. Essentially is a clever way of using two quirks of some EU countries loopholes in tax laws, from treating IP licensing fees (of course the brand and intellectual IP is owned by a British virgin island tax haven, where else could this stuff be created/invented), and the net result is that Apple et al end up payi…
How to counter this: Just regulated the transfer of IP rights. If you sell say a patent portfolio for $50m to your British Virgin Island subsidiary, and then make $20bn in profits in the decade thereafter on that BVI sub, it appears the IP transfer was waaaaay below market value. And should retroactively be taxed in the US where we engineers had developed that stuff in the first place. Problem solved. US tax base res…
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> I wonder how much Irelands payroll taxes would have been were the corporations not to have set up shop in Ireland, they would have just gone somewhere with a decent tax arrangement. A better question is where the world would be if nation states wouldn't allow multinational companies to pay only negligible taxes by taking part in a race to the bottom. With tax deals like this one you're just ripping other countries…
by taking part in a race to the bottom You mean countries competing for business? Why is that bad? It would sound ridiculous if you applied it to companies "Car companies offering lower and lower prices is just a race to the bottom! If this keeps up we'll have no car companies as they'll all be bankrupt!".
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EU governments, including the Irish one, are free to set different tax rates for different industries. (They are not free to set tariffs but that is because tariffs are a core EU competency as defined in the treaties.) Member states are not free to set different tax rates for different companies . This is part of the deal of joining the EU and has been part of the treaties since the beginning. The only surprising thi…
Ireland did NOT set a different tax rate for Apple or for a specific industry that was basically just Apple. Apple simply structured itself to minimize taxes taking into account the laws at the time. Any company was free to do the same and many did. The structure is so common that there are even two terms that are in standard use to describe this structure, the Double Irish and the Double Dutch. The EU did not sudden…
What exactly is the argument against whistling back governments colluding with foreign corporations at the expense of domestic businesses?
> The EU was supposed to be about free movement, no "TARIFFS" as in impediments to TRADE within the block and a single currency.
The EU is about working together instead of each country racing each other to the bottom at the behest of non-EU interests and power blocks.
> unelected bureaucrats in Europe dictating to elected national governments
or you could read up on how it actually functions.
This is exactly the sort of job I would expect a EU competition commissioner to do. It's now up to the courts to verify if the findings are correct.
Regardless of the outcome, I'm very happy to see this part of the system works.