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France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

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Re: France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

#151

Post by tonyedgecombe »

kortilla wrote: post #142
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taxation is theft. No it isn't. Property rights are determined by the state, hence taxation by the state cannot be considered theft.

That’s not really a valid argument against “taxation is theft”. As a citizen born in a country, you never enter into an agreement that the government should be able to take a cut of all of your transactions, but that’s what happens and refusal to partake results in violence (an arrest and time in prison). It’s no different than the local mob going around giving beatdowns to get protection money from businesses. The p…

No, but you also don't have to partake in the economic system, that is your choice.

Re: France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

#152

Post by infinity0 »

lurker213 wrote: post #149

why are governments such parasites? wanting to stick their finger in every pie?

why are corporations such parasites? benefiting from the citizens in a country like France that are supported by its social services and infrastructure like roads, healthcare, a justice system that prevents the corporation's property from being stolen, but not contributing their fair share of the tax back and even arrogantly denying that they are benefiting from the infrastructure that they are taking advantage of for free?

Re: France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

#153

Post by iguy »

BartBoch wrote: post #141
sbacic wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the imbalance is that an Irish company is more competitive than a French one, then no, not really.

In this case, this will be the race to the bottom and smallest countries will be able to charge 0% tax just for the sake of office space rented since their domestic market is small enough to not bring much of income tax (Luxembourg for example). The issue here is with omitting responsibilities. If a company makes hundreds of millions of income in a country, it should pay some taxes there. There is a huge push in Pola…

That's interesting. Are there large companies who would pay this 1.5%, who do not at present pay much Polish VAT? Or employ many people?

Otherwise, why not tweak existing large taxes? You could do it on the employer's social security contribution (i.e. the part paid before not after the nominal salary) to make it sound better.

Re: France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

#154

Post by rayiner »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #140
cpursley wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning tax evasion is easy. Just get rid of corporate income taxes and replace it with a sales tax. It's not like corporations pay taxes anyways; their customers do as tax is built into the cost of products.

I see a couple of issues with this solution: 1) Companies would not pay most of their taxes where they put the greatest strain in public infrastructure. 2) Moderate differences in VAT rates would create enormous price differnces, which would invite smuggling. 3) The incentive for rich people to move to low tax destinations would be even greater than it already is. I won't deny that the solution has upsides as well th…

Companies don’t put strain in public infrastructure. They’re legal abstractions. People and their activities (employees, shipping, factories) put strain on the public infrastructure, and they can be taxed (income, real estate, and pollution taxes) at that point.

The issue is that when Google shows ads to someone in the UK to monetize a search service used by the UK person, Google uses almost no UK resources.

Re: France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

#155

Post by tonyedgecombe »

bobl wrote: post #150
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Eastern European countries have been growing consistently for years. If you only look at economics countries like Poland have been doing very well. You have to remember Western Europe has developed economies. They aren't likely to grow at the rate Asian countries are as those economies have a lot of catching up to do. Also European countries don't necessarily have the same priorities as the US for example. Most o…

I am not so much concerned about growth as such, but about European countries inability to convert progress into prosperity. This might not be the best example, but take cars. A country like the US would build a interstate highway system, probably subsidize car manufacturing and go on to create a huge factor of progress for decades to come. You have successfully converted technological progress into a meaningful fact…

>Yet, in few to no European countries would you expect that the fundamentals of the information age like education, health care, housing, infrastructure and work environment will get better and more accessible in the next ten years.

I do expect that. Of course there are some problems like an ageing population and the fiscal irresponsibility of some countries, but those problems aren't unique to Europe.

To take your example of the highway system there is huge development going on across Europe.[1]..[8]

Your conclusion is too gloomy, I know it's the standard message spouted by the media but I really don't think it's true.

[1] https://www.theb1m.com/video/norways-47bn-coastal-highway [2] http://www.crossrail.co.uk [3] https://theurbandeveloper.com/articles/designing-cities-with... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2 [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanka_tunnel_complex\ [7] http://www.vde8.de/---_site.index..ls_dir._function.set__lan...

Re: France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

#156

Post by benologist »

snarf21 wrote: post #62
yann63 wrote: post #2

Couldn't we just ban tax evasion? What makes it so hard? (honest question) A recent European study has shown that the more company win money, the less they pay in taxes (in percentage). Is it because of bad laws? Corrupt politicians? Something else?

As others have said, it isn't evasion but avoidance. The issue is that there a lot of ways to put the money on the books wherever you want it. Let's say you want to sell mobile phones. You could create one company in France that builds, buys and sells phones. In this case it becomes pretty clear it is a French company and all the money will be taxed in France. But let's say you have that same company and split it up…

It's tax avoidance because we call it that, so why don't we start by not saying tax avoidance anymore and call it tax evasion like it literally is when a company invests massively in accounting to abscond with their taxes.

Re: France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

#157

Post by ttoinou »

markdown wrote: post #148
ttoinou wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or stop taxing "profits" but tax every transaction on its total amount, that would also end a lot of "tax niches"

You mean like VAT/GST.

Not like GST : it would be on all transactions in the legal currency, including B2B. There wouldn't be an artificial difference between "businesses" and "customers"

Not like VAT : VAT is way more complex and expenses are deducted at each step

Re: France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

#158

Post by ttoinou »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #146
ttoinou wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or stop taxing "profits" but tax every transaction on its total amount, that would also end a lot of "tax niches"

We already have VAT or sales tax.

> Or stop taxing "profits"

By "profits" I meant to stop business being able to claim expenses and reduce the tax. We could replace complex taxation scheme only-on-positive-profit with a simple 1% (for example) tax on all transfers, on the total amount, no matter what is the purpose of the money transfer

Re: France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

#159

Post by Nimitz14 »

throwaway_9168 wrote: post #113
Nimitz14 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me 5min of googling to find out VAT MOSS > MOSS means you don't need to register with tax authorities in every EU country you sell to, instead, you can register for VAT, file VAT returns and make payments in one single place. Sounds pretty great to me.

>> Sounds pretty great to me. I see. Do you mind spending another 5 and tell the answer to this question: suppose someone sells online courses. And they don't themselves reside in the EU, but the have customers who do. Should they register for VAT?

What do you mean "should they register for VAT"? You should be registering for VAT in your home country anyways. Or are you talking about additionally registering for VAT MOSS? The answer is no you don't have to, it's just convenient because it's less admin (as otherwise you should be registering for VAT in each EU country that you have customers). I knew all that from the previous 5 minutes I spent on it.

Re: France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants

#160

Post by tonyedgecombe »

ttoinou wrote: post #158
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have VAT or sales tax.

> Or stop taxing "profits" By "profits" I meant to stop business being able to claim expenses and reduce the tax. We could replace complex taxation scheme only-on-positive-profit with a simple 1% (for example) tax on all transfers, on the total amount, no matter what is the purpose of the money transfer

The trouble with that is it will penalise low margin businesses, Apple could easily afford it on their 30% margin but a budget PC maker with a 3% margin would struggle.
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