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Spain planning on going ahead with ‘Google tax’ despite US tariff threats

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271–275 of 275 posts

Re: Spain planning on going ahead with ‘Google tax’ despite US tariff threats

#271
post #82

IMO the corporate tax rate should be zero, and then everyone would be on the same playing field. Right now the only companies that pay taxes are small ones without the resources and staff to get around it. With 0% corporate tax, all of these games and shenanigans would end. Also, corporate profits are double-taxed anyway, as taxes are paid once on profits then again as dividends / capital gains by the shareholders. T…

A man after my own heart. I've long been saying that corporate tax rates should be zero, but all dividend and capital gains rates should be taxed at regular earned income rates. What we have now is this weird system where income earned through investments is taxed twice (first corporate, then dividend or cap gain) but each at a lower rate. Just normalize everything.

Re: Spain planning on going ahead with ‘Google tax’ despite US tariff threats

#272
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero corporate tax would lead to a lot of avoidance and drops in government revenue. Say you are a consultant earning 100k a year who owns a house. You could just pay the 100k to your company and borrow against the house for living costs and pay zero tax for the time being.

> Zero corporate tax would lead to a lot of avoidance and drops in government revenue. Say you are a consultant earning 100k a year who owns a house. You could just pay the 100k to your company and borrow against the house for living costs and pay zero tax for the time being. The issue is that you can already do this by using a corporation incorporated in a jurisdiction with no (or lower) corporate income tax -- whic…

> Which works great for Apple, because they don't have anything to spend the money on anyway

Not true. Apple spends boatloads of money on dividends and share repurchases. Apple doesn't pay taxes on that, but shareholders do.

Re: Spain planning on going ahead with ‘Google tax’ despite US tariff threats

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for being offtopic but I did not see an email in your profile. Would you by any chance happen to have this pdf? http://www.liacs.nl/~opeters/orlein.pdf You posted the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9890599 a few years back but sadly it is dead now. I am a hobbyist interested in cryptography (and a fan of chacha) and so when I saw the "AEAD design similar to ChaCha, that was doing 1.5 cpb authentic…

Wow, that was a long time ago. I do still have the PDF, but I don't really wish to proliferate it, looking back now. In particular the 'paper' doesn't contain any cryptanalysis, and just 'assumes' it is secure. I was 19 when I wrote it. That said, the design of the mode of operation was quite elegant and efficient. Assuming you are familiar with the field, it consisted of taking the core of BLAKE2 as a tweakable secu…

This is really cool, and quite impressive for a 19 year old. Thank you for your explanation.

Re: Spain planning on going ahead with ‘Google tax’ despite US tariff threats

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pay a substantial portion of my income in rent. That's not because my landlord is satisfying my wants or needs. If you don't need or want shelter then why are you paying the rent? Clearly the landlord is providing something of value to you. > The social utility of taxation is simply that in a democracy, the people can decide what they need. Nonsense. People can decide what they need perfectly well in the absence…

I guess we're in ideology territory here. You know as well as I do that the word 'rent' does not refer to an exchange of services, but rather comes from money you extract through ownership of a thing - no matter the provenance. People wouldn't mind free market radicalism so much if they were restricted to just those things in which a free market is possible. Otherwise, you can enjoy deciding which broadband provider…

> Unless there's an apriori link between some people making money and universal good that I'm unaware of, there's no way you can step around that.

The issue here is that there is no such thing as an objective "universal good"; that's just code for "things of which I happen to approve". The closest analogue which actually does objectively exist is "actions agreed to by all participants which do not actively harm anyone else". Granting the participants the barest courtesy that they are in the best position to know their own concerns, such actions can be considered at worst neutral and in general a net-positive on the basis that the action would not occur if anyone affected by it did not see it a priori as being in their own best interest. Others may not perceive the action as "good", but as these others are by definition not impacted and thus have no standing in the matter, their opinion is irrelevant. Participants may be wrong about whether the action will benefit them, of course, and you are welcome to attempt to persuade them to your view if you feel their judgement is in error, but right or wrong this is ultimately their decision to make, not yours.

Obviously actions which harm non-participants should be out of bounds—that's something the anarcho-capitalists (a.k.a. libertarians), minarchists, and most others can agree on in principle, though for some reason only the anarcho-capitalists are consistent in applying the same rules to governments. With that caveat, however: companies exist to make money, and they do so by engaging in voluntary trades that each participant expects to benefit from. These trade are thus both individually and collectively a net benefit to the participants and either neutral or beneficial to everyone else, according to the only objective measure available.

If your happiness depends on others doing only those things which you consider "good", and not what they collectively see as their own self-interest, then I'm sorry but I really don't know how to help you. This is harm you cause to yourself and not any result of others' actions.

Re: Spain planning on going ahead with ‘Google tax’ despite US tariff threats

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we're in ideology territory here. You know as well as I do that the word 'rent' does not refer to an exchange of services, but rather comes from money you extract through ownership of a thing - no matter the provenance. People wouldn't mind free market radicalism so much if they were restricted to just those things in which a free market is possible. Otherwise, you can enjoy deciding which broadband provider…

> Unless there's an apriori link between some people making money and universal good that I'm unaware of, there's no way you can step around that. The issue here is that there is no such thing as an objective "universal good"; that's just code for "things of which I happen to approve". The closest analogue which actually does objectively exist is "actions agreed to by all participants which do not actively harm anyon…

>there is no such thing as an objective "universal good"

I guess here is where we part ways. I can understand it in the sense of objective morality not existing, but I don't think it makes sense to say there isn't a common good. I don't know what the word good means if it doesn't refer to something that happens between people.

I think it's a basic function of groups that they establish what is and isn't good - that forms customs, then law. Obviously, this is a flawed process, but I don't think it makes sense to go total nihilist about it, and just say because you can't prove positive and negative outcomes about given actions, you shouldn't try.

We're fully capable as a society of discussing outcomes of various actions and laws - and that's what we've been doing since the beginning of time. You're doing it yourself when you say 'actions that harm non-participants should be out of bounds'. You're just drawing arbitrary boundaries around the few rules anarcho-capitalists consider sacrosanct[1] and saying that these are obvious, while others are matters of personal opinion that are indeterminate.

I think the idea of 'voluntary trades' is also a bit strange. All trades have side-effects, and most trades are with an element of coercion, natural or otherwise - people need food and shelter, they can't simply not trade for them. So even if you freely trade to build a dogfood factory next to my house, I'm implicitly part of that trade, because I live next door (or if you push the argument along, we're all implicitly involved in basically every trade, because we live on the same planet - e.g. global warming).

[1] - by the by, but I'm pretty sure these rules wouldn't be enough. If you look at early modern history, you can see that a lot of state formation was driven by the needs of capitalism - as states respond to one crisis after another.

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