Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 324 posts

Re: Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

#291

Post by realusername »

adrianN wrote: post #135
slededit wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At some extreme point (like Starbucks for example) you can just declare it fraud and calculate an appropriate amount of tax they should pay and make them pay. Finance is the only legal area I know where we apply everything by the letter of the law and not the spirit of it, that concept did apply for torrent sites for example, if you only base it on technicality, they are legal.

Re: Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

#292

Post by bsaul »

flosim wrote: post #275
bsaul wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware that every single high ranking french administration officer and policy maker for the last 50 years came from the same school ( including bruno lemaire), and that this school recruits almost nobody coming from the private sector ( although this is starting to change, but only very recently). That’s the « they ». Everybody in the fifth republic believes that the state should regulate the economy, while h…

1 - You seem to imply that for one to be a good "bureaucrat", one needs to have roots in the private sector. Can I just say that this is far from obvious for everybody? If anything, I'd be wary of those people as they pose a far greater risk of conflict of interests. I don't want to be run by lobbies, thank you. The recent story of M. Kohler, Macron's closest ally, makes me very wary. I won't say that all private ban…

Wow, so now not accepting taxes on revenue as something sound makes you « ultra liberal » ?

how fast things evolve...

Re: Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

#293

Post by realusername »

bsaul wrote: post #205
zilian wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You totally underestimate the governement ability to understand things.

They have a background, a history. They’ve spent the last 40 years adding layer upon layer of tax and subvention mechanism to try to regulate the economy while solving zero fundamental issues ( unemployment, industry, global private sector attractivness, education and recently even healthcare). The only thing they’ve managed to do is to increase the cost of the public sector. So yes, indeed i don’t have any kind of t…

> The only thing they’ve managed to do is to increase the cost of the public sector

The cost of the public sector has increased because of the large wave of privatizations, it's called the cost of capital.

Re: Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

#294

Post by simias »

woodpanel wrote: post #238
simias wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that "uniform" wasn't the right word, I was thinking more about cooperating and managing taxes as a whole (in order to find a compromise that would benefit everybody). It doesn't mean that everybody would have the same taxes but at least there would be some level of coherency. >In the US it works by forcing states to compete on regulation and taxes which benefits everyone. Everyone except the environment at l…

> Then we give the Irish exactly the same amount they're currently receiving Please don't take this the wrong way but: There's a whole body of tax-literature and tax-philosophy that renders such a statement naive. How do you figure e.g., how the current money Ireland makes is linked to the increase or decrease of tax-rates? How is it linked to other factors making Ireland worthwhile to invest? How much was Ireland ac…

I acknowledge that my thought experiment was very simplistic and ignores many factors but my point was that I can't really imagine how we'd end up worse off negotiating as a whole union instead of competing with each other internally and trying to undercut your partners at any occasion. I mean, that's the whole principle behind unions (as in syndicate of workers for instance), as a whole you have more bargaining power, as individuals you're as weak as your weakest link (whoever is willing to concede the biggest tax breaks, cut down on environmental regulations etc...).

I mean the EU, the free market, the euro, all that doesn't have "hundreds of years of cultural norms and customs" behind it. Why couldn't we go further? The only thing that we've had consistently over hundreds (or even thousand) of years in Europe is warfare and royal inbreeding. If we could avoid having to invade Ireland or having our finance ministers wed each-other in order to settle this tax dispute I think it would be grand.

Re: Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

#295

Post by ionised »

nradov wrote: post #100
ionised wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because that sovereign state agreed to an economic union with other nations.

That's a non sequitur. One matter has nothing to do with the other.

It does if that Union determines how some tax laws are applied union-wide.

Re: Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

#296

Post by logifail »

shaki-dora wrote: post #215
logifail wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's just basic horse-trading I understand it's all about horse-trading, it's the meaning of the word "everyone" in the claim "a net positive for everyone" that I question. My understanding of European Union horse-trading is that it's all about "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours". This might well be good for most if not all EU politicians and bureaucrats, it's patently not going to be a net positive for ever…

"Everyone" was meant as "every EU member state". Of course no policy will ever truly be net positive for 300M+ people. That's impossible, in that, for example, a magic spell instantly turning North Korea into a free, democratic, peaceful country renown for its humor and abundance of good spots for snorkeling would likely be negative for Kim Jong Un. For the EU this discussion is basically identical with the tired fla…

>> Of course no policy will ever truly be net positive for 300M+ people.

Never mind all of them, one could ask whether some "horse-traded" policies are even a net positive for a simple majority? I'm thinking of, for instance, the Common Agricultural Policy.

This certainly isn't just an EU issue, or even confined to politics, small groups often seem to wield a disproportionate amount of power.

Taleb has commented on this.[0]

[0] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Re: Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

#297

Post by adamlett »

tananaev wrote: post #175
adamlett wrote: post #171

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the sole reason multinational corporations can avoid paying taxes, that they “have to” pay surprisingly large royalties to some sister company in a tax haven that “owns” all the rights to the mother company’s trademarks and other IP? Isn’t this the reason that a company like Google mysteriously isn’t able to turn a profit in most European countries? And if I’m right, couldn’t…

But they should be able to pay something to sister or parent company because they actually use the software developed there. The question is how much. Probably not all of the profits. I guess it's really hard to determine and define strict and fair rules in this area.

If we were talking about something that had a non-zero marginal cost such as tangible goods or services, I would tend to agree. The problem with (or benefit of, depending on your perspective I guess) IP is that apart from a fixed upfront investment (which granted can be substantial), it costs nothing to "produce" or transfer. Allowing a company to in effect pay licenses to itself, is therefore IMHO nothing but an invitation to the company to choose where it wants to get taxed.

Re: Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

#298

Post by ionised »

bsaul wrote: post #205
zilian wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You totally underestimate the governement ability to understand things.

They have a background, a history. They’ve spent the last 40 years adding layer upon layer of tax and subvention mechanism to try to regulate the economy while solving zero fundamental issues ( unemployment, industry, global private sector attractivness, education and recently even healthcare). The only thing they’ve managed to do is to increase the cost of the public sector. So yes, indeed i don’t have any kind of t…

This is just getting into an ideological rant now.

Re: Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

#299

Post by ionised »

flosim wrote: post #283
slededit wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should help explain Brexit a little better. The EU is about giving up sovereignty. It may or may not be a fair trade depending on your POV. But people talk about it like the EU is a no brainer by looking only at economic grounds.

For me, the whole aspect on which the EU is a no-brainer is peace, and leverage against powerful lunatics and maniacs, like Trump and Putin. Which is precisely why the latter is hell-bent on dismantling it. Not from the economical standpoint.

I don't think the the people who value their ideology more than pragmatism are concerned with peace to be honest.

Re: Three European Countries Block Tax on Tech Giants

#300

Post by oarsinsync »

rusk wrote: post #158
oarsinsync wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that indigenous and/or small businesses are taxed at a higher rate than the published standard 12.5%, or that they don't qualify for even better exemptions and thus lower effective rates than 12.5%? GP was indicating that Ireland has one of the lowest standard corporation taxes at 12.5% available to everyone, not that there aren't even better effective rates offered to larger corps & multinationals…

Yes I’m stating that as an absolute fact.

Can you provide any evidence, as everything I can see shows 12.5% on trading income, and 25% on non-trading income.

Are you referring to the non-trading income corporation tax rate, or is there something else going on? If something else, that sounds an awful lot like corruption

Post reply on HN