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Irish media spinning this as a win for the irish people, while there are ongoing talks of increasing income tax on normal people to help cover the cost of this pandemic. Disgraceful.
No tax was owed to the Irish people from Apple. It was European commisson overreach. [Edit: been this comment is oscillating between -1 and 1 like a yoyo.]
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Exactly. This is not Apples fault though, since they are not responsible for tax laws. The EU could have been a vehicle to solve that problem together, but since then I lost my believe it could enact change. Ireland has probably interest in large cooperation staying in Dublin and it might really be in the interest of Irish citizens too... Still, the current situation is just a grave case of injustice.
Would you say that someone who finds a way to murder someone within the law isn't at fault in that murder? You're simply playing a game of semantics, they're still culpable of tax evasion, just not legally culpable. Just because Apple have found a way to avoid tax, doesn't mean it's not their fault. You might find some idiots who argue there's a shareholder requirement, but that's not the law either.
This is a pretty ridiculous comparison. Murder isn't bad because it's illegal, it's bad because pretty much all ethical systems consider it a terrible thing to randomly kill someone. There's certainly a lot less agreement that a company is ethically obliged to pay a government a double-digit percentage of its earnings if it wants to sell people there things they want to buy.
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>Transfer pricing and tax havens are draining money out of the economies of most European countries, breaking the virtuous cycle where consumer spending also leads to salaries, taxes and more investment in the community, to keep the economy going - instead we have a shrinking middle class, as the fuel is drained from the engine. An alternative interpretation is that the high degree of taxes and regulations in Europe…
What are the benefits of a fortune 500? Who are the beneficiaries? The main ones would be investors and management, including a subset of employees. Given the tax loopholes that are often taken advantage of, I would hardly say that the countries or cities they reside in are beneficiaries in as far as tax income, though they definitely have a hub effect of drawing people into the locations they are in. Whether that is…
Literally any entity they interact with. And F500's interact a lot with a lot of entities!
This is a disgraceful verdict for the Irish people. We laid ourselves bare as a tax haven for MegaCorps, and now we're not even seeing the benefits.
People in Europe keep saying these are "brass plate" operations -- however Google, Facebook and Apple all employ absolutely thousands here. US Multinationals are crucial to the Irish economy and tax base.
From the original finding: "The Commission's investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 percent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 percent in 2014." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_…
Meanwhile, the working people in Germany are paying 20 percent to 35 percent income taxes in their salaries.
Irish media spinning this as a win for the irish people, while there are ongoing talks of increasing income tax on normal people to help cover the cost of this pandemic. Disgraceful.
Apple is ultimately normal people as well, either buying from them or working for them.
Transfer pricing and tax havens are draining money out of the economies of most European countries, breaking the virtuous cycle where consumer spending also leads to salaries, taxes and more investment in the community, to keep the economy going - instead we have a shrinking middle class, as the fuel is drained from the engine. Ireland, Luxembourg and certain other countries are complicit in this. We clearly need bet…
>Transfer pricing and tax havens are draining money out of the economies of most European countries, breaking the virtuous cycle where consumer spending also leads to salaries, taxes and more investment in the community, to keep the economy going - instead we have a shrinking middle class, as the fuel is drained from the engine. An alternative interpretation is that the high degree of taxes and regulations in Europe…
The situation is far more dire in the EU than even that would suggest.
Spain and Italy (#3 and #4 largest economies in the EU) will spend the next 20 years just trying to get back to where they were in 2007, and will have lost a minimum of 30 years to net economic stagnation. That's the good scenario.
Prior to the virus, France had seen zero net economic growth for 12 years. That's despite adding three million people to their population, which means the pie is shrinking for each French person.
Germany had seen zero net economic growth for 11-12 years. With the virus hit they'll probably go a net 20 years with zero GDP per capita expansion.
The same scenario is playing out across most of the EU's members. There's no growth to be found anywhere outside of the Baltics and Ireland (11m population combined), while social system costs continue to climb and demographics continue to age. You can see this erosion effect playing out for example in the collapse of EU spending on infrastructure (which has fallen below the US level as a share of GDP).
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>Transfer pricing and tax havens are draining money out of the economies of most European countries, breaking the virtuous cycle where consumer spending also leads to salaries, taxes and more investment in the community, to keep the economy going - instead we have a shrinking middle class, as the fuel is drained from the engine. An alternative interpretation is that the high degree of taxes and regulations in Europe…
What are the benefits of a fortune 500? Who are the beneficiaries? The main ones would be investors and management, including a subset of employees. Given the tax loopholes that are often taken advantage of, I would hardly say that the countries or cities they reside in are beneficiaries in as far as tax income, though they definitely have a hub effect of drawing people into the locations they are in. Whether that is…
Workers are also a pretty big beneficiary: look how well workers at recent Fortune 500 entries like FAANG are paid. Even after accounting for subsidised health and education benefits the average European developer is still lucky to earn even half of what the average US developer does. Sure it's noble for Europeans to want more equality but I don't think policies that reduce salaries are a good way to do that; better to lift the worse-off up than pull the better-off down.
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Exactly. This is not Apples fault though, since they are not responsible for tax laws. The EU could have been a vehicle to solve that problem together, but since then I lost my believe it could enact change. Ireland has probably interest in large cooperation staying in Dublin and it might really be in the interest of Irish citizens too... Still, the current situation is just a grave case of injustice.
Would you say that someone who finds a way to murder someone within the law isn't at fault in that murder? You're simply playing a game of semantics, they're still culpable of tax evasion, just not legally culpable. Just because Apple have found a way to avoid tax, doesn't mean it's not their fault. You might find some idiots who argue there's a shareholder requirement, but that's not the law either.
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It could be. But they're only going to piss off the EU even more with these moves. Right now Apple is probably winning a battle but might be losing the war. The next big EU mandate, besides tackling climate change, will probably be clamping down on tax shenanigans. Next time they won't even be able to win anything as the law will be explicitly against such corporate maneuvers.
Are you sure? I think that countries that benefit from such schemes (e.g. Ireland, Netherlands, Luxembourg) can veto, sink such proposals before they land, or simply partially comply. For instance, the Netherlands announced a withholding tax on royalties for 2021 "for cases where abuse is involved" [1] after international pressure. The way I read this is that they are building a facade where it looks they are complyi…
However, the reality is... realpolitik still exists. If Germany and France decide things should really change, what negotiating power do you think the Netherlands or Luxembourg or Ireland really have?
For example the Dutch economy is basically hitched to the German one, Germany can find a lot of creative ways to inflict a lot of pain on the Netherlands if it really wants to ;-)