121–130 of 485 posts
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European developers don't need to live in areas though, where they have to pay 2 million dollars for a house and they have social security and health care. This lessens your argument.
I live and work in Munich and I have to pay half a million euros for a 25m^2 box. EU is cheaper than US is a fallacy.
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>Given a fixed amount of resources People don't consume resources, they consume goods and services. The IPhone is valued at a much higher price than the sum of raw resource components it contains. Economic growth is what allows us to increase the amount of goods and services people can consume from a given set of resources. Economic growth is why a single farmer with modern equipment can produce more food than a hund…
Using resources as a blanket term to describe goods and services as fungible with a market that can trade them, it's probably a better descriptor of available goods and services that can be consumed instead of the fluctuating cost of said goods and services. True we could produce more goods than we have before with a lower cost, but it isn't true that this enables us to provide more to those without means as this wou…
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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…
>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. 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…
FANNGS, by definition, are 1% of the Fortune 500. In term of headcount, it's even lower. They should not even be part of this argument. You can't base taxation policies around the personal experience of hyper-specialized, in-demand trained professionals.
Fortune 500 no1: Walmart. no2? Amazon.
Are you arguing that those kinds of companies have a upward pressure on salaries? Because at least in the case of Walmart and Amazon (excluding AWS), it's proven that it doesn't. And in terms of workforce, the low-pay employees that those companies hire overwhelm "well-paid" engineers from FAANGS a 1000-1. And that's not even accouting for all "red badge" contractors not lucky enough to get a cosy position at those FAANGS, who don't appear in the company's salary statistics, and are not in such a good financial situation themselves.
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>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. 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…
European developers don't need to live in areas though, where they have to pay 2 million dollars for a house and they have social security and health care. This lessens your argument.
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.
Ireland has built its modern economy on being attractive to multinationals. And it's worked. 10 MNCs alone pay 40% of all tax revenue in the country. They've brought jobs and wealth to a country that was previously big in dairy & emigration.
For the generation above me, the career path was study, leave, earn your money elsewhere - and perhaps come home one day to start a family. Perhaps. For the generation below me, they can go straight from Uni to FAANG (maybe FAAMG? I think msft are bigger than netflix in Dublin), startups, or elsewhere in the booming tech & pharma sectors.
Pandering to MNCs was a good strategy. It paid off. But it's not sustainable - no-one actually wants to win a race to the bottom.
I'm not sure biting the hand that feeds us is the best step to make right now though. We need to diversify first. We need to encourage home-grown talent. We need to wean the MNCs off their tax strategies slow enough that we don't startle them, etc.
Like it or not we are currently intertwined. That needs to be solved first - otherwise we just turn the tap off and return to the 80s.
(Yes I'm biased: I work for an MNC that probably wouldn't be here without this strategy. Without this strategy, I wouldn't be living here.)
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> The US had also emerged as pretty much the only unbombed industrial country after a global war, giving it a significant advantage Ding-ding-ding - you hit the nail on the head! The US' competitive advantage and special position in the world, including all those fortune 500 companies, doesn't come from its special adherence to laissez-faire capitalism, it comes from other historic advantages. The supply-side trickle…
>Here's a very non-random book I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce... According to Wikipedia, that book makes the argument that economic equality will grow over time. It doesn't show that countries with more economic freedom grow slower. To copy from the "Criticisms" section of that wiki page: " According to Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, he merely assumes that inequality mat…
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I live and work in Munich and I have to pay half a million euros for a 25m^2 box. EU is cheaper than US is a fallacy.
Wow, really? 20000 EUR per square meter, for small apartment in Munich? That's... more than I expected.
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…
Perhaps lowering taxes is the answer. Why pay sky-high French taxes when you could pay lower taxes in Ireland?
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It wasn't paid in the US. The purpose of the scheme that Apple (and other companies) were using was to protect profits from US taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
Yes, it was. Their arrangement only helped them defer US taxes, but the taxes were paid when the money was repatriated. https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-pay-38-billion-in-repa...
> A provision allows for a one-time repatriation of corporate cash held abroad at a lower tax rate than what would have been paid under the previous tax plan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/technology/apple-tax-bill...
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companies don't pay VAT because they claim it back on everything they buy they do however collect it
They pay VAT on the value they add between what they buy and what they sell. Hence, Value-Added Tax.
this is the entire principle behind VAT