141–150 of 314 posts
Incorporate your business outside the EU. It will protect you from unreasonable taxes and regulations. The internet has no boundaries or residency or citizenship. Especially if you are a software-as-a-service business, ignore everything about the EU and domicile outside it.
You can incorporate outside and ignore the EU market entirely but it’s money left on the table potentially.
We are all in this world together. It is insane that corporations have been able to reap untold profits while hardly being taxed at all. These companies could not exist without the societies of the people who buy their products. They should pay taxes wherever they do business, even if fiat currency isn't changing hands (i.e., Facebook and Twitter free users) as specified here. Good move EU. Higher taxes on megacorps…
Corporations pay +20% tax on profits, then provide jobs to people which are then taxed 30-50%. Corporations are providing loads of value to society. How on earth is this not enough? Honestly, if this is not enough money for the government to operate there are serious spending and accountability problems. A governments primary purpose is to protect rights of individuals. Its job is not to run the world. If we really w…
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It's pretty clear. You are selling in the UK so the revenue would be taxed there. Post-brexit the French customer will pay customs duty. The Google ad revenue will be paid by Google based on the market. So the ad run in France generates EU revenue. Doesn't matter if the payor was an American or anyone else. If you are US citizen then you pay world wide income tax. You can deduct foreign taxes paid up to a limit. Bett…
> Post-brexit the French customer will pay customs duty. Out of interest: Would they? This is an EU law, so that would assume UK kept it after brexit , either specifically or through some wholesale “fork all the trade laws”. But it would also imply a lack of inter-European treaties, i.e. fork the laws but don’t keep the treaties. I haven’t kept fully up to date with the latest brexit developments , are we far enough…
As an answer big techs will likely break these companies into 100 smaller ones to avoid the thresholds? "The levy would cover companies that have annual worldwide total revenue exceeding 750 million euros ($920 million) and total taxable annual revenue from offering digital services in the EU above 50 million euros."
Just breaking a company in 10 parts owned by a parent doesn’t make any difference. Revenue would be counted at the top (or the idea is pointless)
Out of curiosity, is there any European tech company that has 750m in taxable annual revenues?
I can think of at least Spotify, King, Rovio to name 3
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And taxing revenue punishes economic activity per se. For small firms, it will force them out of business, and only high margin ones will remain (as explained). In other words, for the 2/3rds or so of the economy that is small and medium businesses this will be a tax on having economic activity at all. That's why it'll never fly (or should I say never be enforced). And don't worry, as usual, for large businesses ther…
I think a better explanation is that taxes on revenue favour vertical integration. Imagine a product that requires building widget A, then turning that into widget B, then turning that into widget C. If we have the following companies: C: revenue $6m, purchase costs $4m, other costs $1m B: revenue $4m, purchase costs $2m, other costs $1m A: revenue $2m, purchase costs $0, other costs $1m then taxes are paid on $12m.…
In your second example, the VAT inclusive price would still be $6.6k, and the VAT due would still be $600k.
In practice many non-VAT sales taxes also counters this problem by trying to define what makes a "final" sale or a sale to consumers as opposed to other companies, and taxing only that.
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> Free trade [.. is] just better for everyone involved How are zero-rate imports better for everyone? The consumer saves money. The government loses sales tax revenue, loses income tax revenue from the people that could have made it locally, has lower employment rates. Buying locally doesn't always make sense, but often you can make an economic argument that paying slightly more for something made and sold locally is…
> Buying locally doesn't always make sense, but often you can make an economic argument that paying slightly more for something made and sold locally is better for the consumer too. 9/10 times this isn't correct. If you live in an urban capital, sure. If you live in somewhere more rural, oftentimes the only local makers in the area will be rather terrible, and a large company will have a better warranty almost all of…
But I think we're looking at this from different aspects. I was considering self-imports (eg Alibaba, some Ebay/Amazon sellers). You're considering big-box-Chinesium-imports vs something made by a local mom-and-pop. You might get better support from the big box longevity but that might be more reason for protectionist policy, not less.
If you compare buying imported crap from a big-box to importing it yourself, you're paying the big-box for your "free" warranty. They build it into the price. But 30-50% of your cash is ending up offshore with no benefit to your own economy.
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Are they listed separately on the stock exchange? If so, then they really separate companies, not just different on paper. Their ownership of the different companies will eventually diverge from each other and the companies will need to compete with each other to satisfy their owners. If not, then the taxman will probably be smart enough to send the bill to the parent company instead of the mini-Googles.
>> If so, then they really separate companies, not just different on paper. Their ownership of the different companies will eventually diverge from each other and the companies will need to compete with each other to satisfy their owners. You don't get it... the tax man proved not to be that smart to send the bill to the parent company. You may want to google: "What is a shell company?"
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Most companies have negative profit. All the revenue is offset against r&d and expansion
The problem they are trying to resolve is companies shifting the profit to another country with lower corporation tax.
Also, I chose Ireland as an example because it offers tax concessions to industries ( at least it did in 2006 when I was in the valley)
[1] - Different ways of determining attribution, but simplest is based on billing address of the customer making purchases, including purchasing ads