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Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

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Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#291
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Not these days perhaps, but back in the 1990's it would have. Who else was there, EMC? And if Apple did leave it's not unrealistic that the reasons that made them leave would also be on the minds of the other multinationals in the area.

IMO this sounds like fairly shaky ground to build your economy on

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#292
post #270

Standard Ireland stuff. They want to bring jobs to Ireland, so they create international corporate tax loopholes. My understanding is these loopholes mostly allow US tech companies to make large real profits in Europe, have them attribute to an Irish office, but then bullshit the profits away by claiming things like paying licensing fees to themselves, for their own tech, paid to a subsidiary in an even sketchier tax…

It seems to me absolutely ethical. Any country can make whatever tax laws they want to get an advantage over other countries. If the EU and its population want to ban this practice, they should reorganize the tax laws.

The ethical problem here is the consequence of the same game theory you're citing as a solution - the next country can always cut taxes more

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#294
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while in most of Europe(except the East) it does not. Wait, something doesn't add up here. I see many programmers migrating from eastern to western Europe, but not the other way around. It is true that programming as a profession will offer comparatively higher standard of living in eastern Europe (when compared to other professions), but that's because the overall standard of living is lower than it is in the west…

A lot of people move from Eastern Europe to Western because the political (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine) and LGBT (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland) reasons, not money.

Not at all. By far the biggest engine of emigration is money. In my country (Romania) there are millions of people working in western Europe (2 million in Spain, 1 million in Italy, probably something similar in the UK + Germany + France). A large number of them are parents who leave their children at home and work for most of the year there to gather money.

Even if you're talking about just software devs, people still move to the west for higher salaries, though I believe there is more movement towards the US, especially since the software industry has a lot of local branches of US companies.

But I can tell you from the ground that at least the common perception is that you are generally going to be wealthier as a software developer in western Europe than in Romania, even though in Romania software devs tend to be much better off than the majority of the workforce (and even though software devs in Romania don't pay income tax on their salaries, which is a nice 15% rebate).

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#295
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! You just need to form a company, then declare your assets as belonging to your company, and not yours.

Pretty sure the tax man will call that “benefit in kind”

LOL I am sure you are right, I was joking of course :-)

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We clearly need better tax laws to combat this, but I'm glad the commission is trying to fight this to the extent they can within current laws, and I hope they win the case on appeal. I fully agree with the former, but—to an extent—disagree with the latter. The thing that bothers me about this lawsuit is the fact that it is in essence an after-the-fact tax increase. If they want to reform tax law, then it should be…

Yes and to shut down Cayman Islands and Cyprus while they're at it. It goes to show how incredibly corrupt the global elites are that they "can't" shut down money laundering by tiny island nations who would roll over in 5 seconds if told to by someone like the US. The truth is they love it because that's where they keep their money.

We clearly do all have officials who should be dealing with this. I wonder if they can be persecuted for treason.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We clearly need better tax laws to combat this, but I'm glad the commission is trying to fight this to the extent they can within current laws, and I hope they win the case on appeal. I fully agree with the former, but—to an extent—disagree with the latter. The thing that bothers me about this lawsuit is the fact that it is in essence an after-the-fact tax increase. If they want to reform tax law, then it should be…

Yes and to shut down Cayman Islands and Cyprus while they're at it. It goes to show how incredibly corrupt the global elites are that they "can't" shut down money laundering by tiny island nations who would roll over in 5 seconds if told to by someone like the US. The truth is they love it because that's where they keep their money.

If you take a closer look at tax havens, you'll find that most of them are UK/US colonies, ex-colonies or de facto colonies.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We clearly need better tax laws to combat this, but I'm glad the commission is trying to fight this to the extent they can within current laws, and I hope they win the case on appeal. I fully agree with the former, but—to an extent—disagree with the latter. The thing that bothers me about this lawsuit is the fact that it is in essence an after-the-fact tax increase. If they want to reform tax law, then it should be…

> If they want to reform tax law, then it should be forward facing, not trying to reverse previous established policies. The EU argument was that Ireland's "previous established policies" were against EU treaty, and so the (alleged) special deal that IE gave Apple should be considered annulled since it was invalid from the day it was signed. > On this basis, the Commission concluded that the tax rulings issued by Ire…

> The EU argument was that Ireland's "previous established policies" were against EU treaty, and so the (alleged) special deal that IE gave Apple should be considered annulled since it was invalid from the day it was signed.

Yet the EU sat on this for 12+ years allowing this agreement to continue. If they felt this was a concern, they should have addressed it in 2004... or any year between.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#300
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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