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Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

bbc.com

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Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#191

Post by ksec »

mrep wrote: post #150
majidazimi wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's half cheaper, a family house of 80-100m^2 costs beyond 600K which is way beyond affordability range of a couple both working as software engineers let alone people with non-tech jobs.

Why is that? Like, on the US west coast, ballooning home prices makes sense because their cities are in valleys with a fixed amount of land, but munich looks like it has a bunch of farmland around it that could be converted into housing increasing supply and thus decreasing prices. This coming from someone in chicagoland which has 9.5 million people but housing isn't crazy because the metro area sprawls 30-40 miles o…

I think it has more to do with world wide's low interest rate which is pushing asset prices to sky rocket.

You now get a fast shrinking middle class and dismal living condition in lower class.

Of course, they could have combated this with more supply. Not sure if they have done so.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#192

Post by Isamu »

Also Ireland is off the hook, if you remember they also disagreed with the original ruling and maintained that they were not offering special deals to various companies like Apple. Instead they benefited from the massive influx of liquidity in their banking system, and all that implies on their domestic economy.

They have since reportedly closed down this option in their tax code because of optics, and they probably don’t need it so much anymore.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#193

Post by fladrif »

dantheman wrote: post #122
fladrif wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Economic growth and technical innovation go hand in hand. As the economy grows the pie gets bigger, as long as everyones absolute amount grows thats good - most people thing that some are shrinking which is not the case. Right now, some peoples are growing at faster rate.

Sorry, I should've said `disproportionately benefits`. Economic growth in this context only serves to further increase inequality.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#194

Post by m12k »

joejerryronnie wrote: post #185
m12k wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless we want international trade to be a one-way process that slowly drains the middle class dry, and triggers the next recession when demand drops to zero, then it is probably better to make sure that whenever a company makes money by selling to consumers, enough money is re-circulated back into that country to maintain the purchasing power of those consumers. (That seems to be a core part of China's strategy, pro…

The devil is in the details though. I’m sure a US capitalist and a French government bureaucrat have very different ideas as to what constitutes “enough money”.

If we fixed profit shifting, then the French bureaucrat could set a tax rate, and the US capitalist would be free to choose whether they wanted their company to do business in France, and thus the market would eventually find some equilibrium for us. Right now it doesn't matter what the French corporate tax rate is, because multinationals don't have to pay it.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#196

Post by danhanlon »

soneil wrote: post #170
netcan wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a race to the bottom though? I mean, a race to the bottom in the normal sense is cutting taxes or spending money on attracting these companies. We help these companies evade other countries' taxes, not our own. Also, officially, the entities involved in the tax evasion are not related to the entities that actually employ people. Would Google move it european customer support offices without this tax deal? Theor…

It all gets terribly murky very quickly. For example, we often claim one of our strengths is that we have a highly educated workforce - but this is circular; people take this path because they know there's good work at the other end of it. If we ripped out those MNCs, that highly educated workforce would vanish quicker than you can say J1. There are other benefits to being in Ireland. We have a common-law legal syste…

Yeah I think you're spot on with everything. I think some change in direction is needed for the long term but it's something we are not really seeing which is concerning.

The well known MNCs seem to be here largely in an operational capacity, the majority of their workforce would be something like trust/risk/support/finance/sales. In terms of "R&D" and "innovation", work that develops the products and services that are sold, I see very little of that happening in Ireland. Yet these companies have huge engineering and product teams in London which are still growing, and the fact they're not placed here is rather telling. For sure we've benefited from the presence of these MNCs so far, but for it to be more sustainable and for the economy to mature further I think we need to be looking to become a country that's attractive beyond being an operational base.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#197

Post by rusk »

secondcoming wrote: post #154
m12k wrote: post #20

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…

Apple has been in Ireland since the 1980's. A large fraction of an entire city (Cork) depend on it. It's not hard to imagine that Apple has contributed far more than $14bn to the community, and country, in that time. And it's not a figure-head office either, it has assembly lines. Countries aren't all identical. Ireland needs to be allowed tune its economic policies based on what it has to offer. It doesn't have the…

> A large fraction of an entire city (Cork) depend on it

That is not true. They employee a few thousand people in an industrial estate outside a suburb of cork in fairly low ranking jobs. If they were to disappear overnight they would doubtless have an impact but not a fraction of €14bn

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#198

Post by zip1234 »

m12k wrote: post #77
logicchains wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 US experienced massive growth in the 50s and 60s while having very high tax rates. The US, until recently had a higher corporate tax rate than many European country - the latest US tax cuts brought it down to the same 21% that my native Denmark has. I'm sorry, but this 'deregulation and low taxes will fix everything' myth has been so thoroughly debunked by now that I'm sad to see it rearing its ugly head in an ot…

In the 50s it was a lot easier to evade taxes as well. Less electronic systems that are easier to track and also a lot of loopholes in the system. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-nocera-tax-avoidance-...

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#199

Post by rusk »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #109
myspy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Social security and healthcare is definitely awesome, but have you checked house prices near big German cities like Munich? They're much closer to Bay Area prices while salaries are very far away. Europeans who keep tooting that "we don't need US salaries" tend to be the more privileged ones who will also inherit a house from their boomer parents and take it for granted, so they don't feel the stress of the rat race…

> have you checked house prices near big German cities like Munich?

People generally don’t buy but rent and the rental market is set in such a way as not to gouge people. Still expensive but salaries are relatively high and in all other respects costs of living is very reasonable

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#200

Post by ksec »

soneil wrote: post #170
netcan wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a race to the bottom though? I mean, a race to the bottom in the normal sense is cutting taxes or spending money on attracting these companies. We help these companies evade other countries' taxes, not our own. Also, officially, the entities involved in the tax evasion are not related to the entities that actually employ people. Would Google move it european customer support offices without this tax deal? Theor…

It all gets terribly murky very quickly. For example, we often claim one of our strengths is that we have a highly educated workforce - but this is circular; people take this path because they know there's good work at the other end of it. If we ripped out those MNCs, that highly educated workforce would vanish quicker than you can say J1. There are other benefits to being in Ireland. We have a common-law legal syste…

>(or perhaps the only factory outside the US?)

The only one I know is in US making Mac Pro.

Interesting, what else is assembled in Cork ? If I buy an iMac in UK, would it be assembled in Cork?

Why is a plant in Cork entry to EUR? Couldn't those be shipped from China?

( Considering this is Apple related I cant be the only keep reading Cork as Cook XD )

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