Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

Why shouldn't the bureaucracy be fed? These companies make money off of it.

I don't see any justification for your position besides a nebulous wish for Europe to have an equivalent of google/facebook, and to be honest, besides adding an extra line on all those "european unicorn" blog posts, i don't see much advantage to it either. There's obviously positives to more profitable businesses - but why another google/facebook?

In order to get tax breaks from a country you must be incorporated in that country. So, tautologically, any company that would pay these EU taxes must be an EU company. In the most pedantic sense, this cannot affect US companies.

However US (and other multinational) companies set up subsidiaries and then funnel money through them to get tax breaks thanks to bilateral double-taxation-avoidance agreements. These would be affected, but they've structured themselves this way intentionally so that their profits are collected in a company headquartered in the EU. (Though it should be noted that headquartering EU operations in an EU country is generally a requirement for dealing with EU consumers without tarrifs and so on, but many multinationals funnel their international money through the EU company).

You can't have it both ways. Either you're an EU company which gives you certain tax breaks, or you're a US company that has no tax benefits in the EU for global revenue.

You're never gonna implement an income based tax system which would be fair to both corporations and employees. Corporations are currently taxed on profit, while employees on 'revenues'. So to make it fair you would:

1. tax corporations on revenue too. Which this thread is about 2. tax employees on profit. Food, gas, utilities, ... - these are basically cost of operation of a human being, aren't they?

Income taxes will never work. Monopoly taxes are a solution though. Monopolies behave as money sinks in economy. Their prices are not competed down, so you can't talk about monopolized system as capitalistic. The more monopolies and wealth concentration you get the more you approach something like feudalism. Which is where we are heading as a civilization right now.

Monopolies are usually created and maintained by heavy regulation, because you don't allow small projects to challenge them. Also monopolies influence regulation in such a way to make it so.

So why not embrace monopolies, but tax them for the service of letting them be monopolies? You can then even not call it tax, but a pay-per-use license granting certain social privileges. Perfectly progressive tax. The more you use, the more you pay.

Whether this policy is good or bad will depend on the details. But generally, in Europe, this kind of priposal is a populism magnet and a dancefloor for cheap politics.

"Standing up to multinational corporations and making them pay their fair share (ra! ra!)" is exactly the type of rhetoric our most generic politicians love.

An American equivalent might be some "government out of your hair" initiative to reduce professional liscencing.. or somesuch.

Once you've got something like that on the table, all the cheapest politicians come out of the woodwork.

On a serious not though, I think it's a good idea if (and only if) this names and addresses the problem which this actually intends to fix: company tax.

Companies have always been difficult to tax properly for 2 reasons. (1) "profit" is whatever your accountant says it is, and this is a manipulatable figure. (2) companies operate in multiple tax jurisdictions. Between these two things, these companies don't pay tax. Besides denying the taxman her due, this gives bigger piles of money and advantage over smaller ones. Not fair. Sad.

I just don't see how modern democracies can address something like this. It's at the nexus of all the things we suck at (politically) at the moment. Cheap idealogy, corporate interest groups, and complicated systems.

If they are making similar use of tax evasion techniques then, yes [0].

Too many people here act like this is something specifically aimed at US companies, when in reality it's not. US companies just happen to be affected the most by it due to their dominance in this particular business sector.

But this is something that has been long overdue and was bound to happen regardless of who was dominating that sector.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/p...