131–140 of 324 posts
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Please help me understand why is it okay to tax people on income but not corporations?
Corporations aren't consumers, so corporation tax is passed on: to customers, employees, or shareholders. Levying taxes via corporations disguises the true level of taxation.
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Ireland have already been given some lucky charms by the EU. For example, they were given permission to set their corporate taxes to a ridiculously low 12.5%.
Why would a sovereign state even need permission from others about purely internal matters such as corporate income tax rates?
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Please help me understand why is it okay to tax people on income but not corporations?
Sorry, the project is actually about taxing "revenue", i fixed it, thanks. Taxing on revenue means a corporation that actually loose money because its expenses (salaries, investmenst, etc) are larger than its sales would still have to pay taxes, making it loose even more money. It doesn't make any kind of sense unless you're targeting a very particular set of companies that you know are making money. In which case yo…
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The margins of businesses like Amazon are largely a matter of fiction, since the subsidiaries can make arbitary charges among themselves: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-fu...
A better solution would be to implement stricter accounting standards across the EU so that such tax dodges wouldn't be possible. This would solve the actual problem.
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Depends, when the corporation is a multinational, then they can evade local taxes by various tricks and send all the profits outside the country. Thus it is necessary to close this loophole, to keep the tax money in the source country.
In that case the economic efficient form of taxation is an expatriation tax.
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Good for them. France and Germany take endless steps to protect their domestic economic interests regardless of what any EU legislation or sense of fairness says, Ireland is well within their rights to do the same.
> France and Germany take endless steps to protect their domestic economic interests It's not even that in this case, because it's not like there are serious European competitors to these companies (except maybe the odd Samwer clone here and there) that could even be protected. This is purely an attempt to rip these companies off, because the governments can.
I find it interesting that the companies are often portrayed as smart for doing this, but politicians are jealous and incompetent. Almost like we worship businesses and malign government. I wonder whose interests that viewpoint supports.
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Because it's not just internal. The EU allows for free cross boarder trade and movement of assets within the EU. Having a lower corporate tax rate in one country means businesses operating in the EU put their revenue through there. It's an automatic incentive. There are rules here because otherwise it would be a race to the bottom. Each country wants Amazon, Google, etc for their employees' income tax. The whole EU l…
>> Having a lower corporate tax rate in one country means businesses operating in the EU put their revenue through there I'm not sure this is true any more, at least not everywhere "Amazon has become the first technology company to abandon controversial corporate structures that divert sales and profits away from UK in the face of a clampdown imposed by George Osborne. From the start of [May 2015] the online retailer…
But there are still lower tax areas. This is still an issue that is not simple to unravel because flat tax was not a founding part of the EU, something we figured out after the fact.
Amazon, Ebay, and Google all put the vast majority of their earnings through secondary states within the EU, not the main markets. I'm not sure what Apple do these days, but they've just paid a couple of ~£200m in extra tax found from an audit. The others "claim" they are going to rectify this, but it's all face-saving. They're all lying tax cheats.
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Good for them. France and Germany take endless steps to protect their domestic economic interests regardless of what any EU legislation or sense of fairness says, Ireland is well within their rights to do the same.
Ireland have already been given some lucky charms by the EU. For example, they were given permission to set their corporate taxes to a ridiculously low 12.5%.
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In that case the economic efficient form of taxation is an expatriation tax.
How would that work in practice? The subsidiary in country A buys all their services from HQ with the price just so happening to consume the profits. How do you tax that without essentially stopping international collaboration?
So while it is a problem, its not a new one - nor an unsolvable one.
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Then let's have a race to the bottom. Some people seem to assume that high corporate income tax rates are a good thing, but there's really no proof of that. We would all be better off if every country eliminated corporate income taxes entirely, and made the change revenue neutral by increasing taxes on high income investors and employees. This would encourage economic growth by eliminating resources wasted on tax acc…
Urgh, No? Zero Corporation Tax allows multinationals to make huge profits and just chuck the money back home, even if that's outside the Union. Yeah, they're probably paying tax on it somewhere , but it's not taxed in the place it was earned. That's the problem here. Countries are losing cash and tax revenue to this. Your trickle-down economics is similarly unproven.