301–310 of 485 posts
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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
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> Workers are also a pretty big beneficiary 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?…
Agree. The most pro-Wal-Mart economists will tell you that Wal-Mart as a firm has boosted the US economy by at least 1% of GDP, by being more efficient, and forcing its competitors to be more efficient as well. Suppose for a moment that we accept that claim uncritically -- it is still very clear to see that these gains do not accrue through the vehicle of employment. Indeed, the non-logistics savings from Wal-Mart co…
Right, must be good for those workers too!
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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 sti…
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As long as there is shareholder before stakeholder, I don't see this as a good argument. Take Amazon. Employees in warehouses are low wage and hire and fire jobs. The CEO is getting richer and richer, not everyone is profiting as well as it could be. What Europe would need is to excel in computer science as well as design and engineering. The topic is pretty lacking here and would need a push. The result would be com…
Keep in mind that the employees in Amazon warehouses are there of their own free will. So, however badly they are treated, Amazon is apparently providing an option to them that's better than any alternative they may have. Surely, that's better than them not having the option to work at Amazon at all.
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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.
There are insane sums being spent in organised campaigns to limit the ability of governments to interfere with this ethic of systemic financial capture.
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>The US experienced massive growth in the 50s and 60s while having very high tax rates. The effective rate actually paid by the top 1% was around 42%, which is not much higher than now: https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/ . . The US had also emerged as pretty much the only unbombed industrial country after a global war, giving it a significant advantage. >so thoroughly debunked by now Debunked…
These people should look at Portugal. One of the highest taxers in Europe and our economy is crap. The middle class is basically paying for the rich and poor and they don't have money to spend on the economy. We can't support our companies because their products are actually more expensive than outside products (companies pay a lot of taxes too). It's more than known by every good economist that overtaxing isn't good…
The US is largely socialism and profits for the corporations and free market absolutism and costs for the working poor.
Living in Denmark and having worked for the tax system (SKAT) here I am glad that this ruling was overturned. I believe that Margrethe Vestager should clean up the tax system here in her home country of Denmark before trying to clean up the tax system in Ireland. The tax system here is slow, corrupt, beaurocratic, and prosecutes the weak and vunerable, while letting people who are famous, or people who owe billions t…
What's wrong with the Danish tax system? Do you have gripes on the technical side, how its hard to use as a consumer or what?
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> Workers are also a pretty big beneficiary 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?…
If I use the S&P 500 instead (easier calculation given available data for me), the the FANG is a huge portion. (Yes, 5 companies out of 500 are by definition 1/100.) No argument about headcount, though. Take a look at the second chart (bottom of "Page 1", the third actual page considering the title page and contents page). [0] Revenue may be small, but profits are huge, and market capitalization (aka "wealth") is abs…
There would be lots of knock-on effects from this, such as more company perks to offset the large taxation of salary, but there are ways to combat that (tax benefits provided to employees as compensation). This would allow companies more capital to invest in R&D or expansion. Some of that money would go to higher wages (but if you distribute taxes more heavily to the wealthy along with this, it wouldn't affect median employee salary much).
A downside (among many, I'm sure) would be even more concentration of wealth in companies which might be used for non-free market operations, such as lobbying. It's all interconnected, so it's complex, but it also doesn't feel like we're in such a good situation socially, economically and politically that we should refrain from making large changes like that.
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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
If the US doesn't like Irelands tax policy ban US companies from setting up Irish subsidiaries.
A lot of this just comes down to the will of the people not being represented in their governments though, but thats just simply a bigger problem to deal with first before the cascade of other symptomatic issues of that root cause can be addressed.
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I feel like this argument lacks a full understanding of what 'net worth' even means. Bezos is not taking enough cash from Amazon to be even remotely relevant to what they pay their warehouse workers. His cash compensation in 2019 was 1.6 million. Not sure how that reflects in 2020, 2021, but the point is that Bezos is only absurdly rich in theory He is theoretically worth hundreds of billions- but his actual consumpt…
> There is no direct link between Bezos net worth and allocation of resources to laborers, and attempts to paint that picture are misguided. If they raised wages of factory workers, profits go down, stock goes down, Bezos net worth go down. no?
They then also can hire a better class of workers, leaving some working there now no longer working there. And as prices go up, everyone loses some value to buying these goods, which is then less to spend on other things.
When a worker is willing to work for some wage and an employer is willing to pay it, both sides benefit, and society as a whole is not paying extra.
> ... profits go down
As does innovation which is paid for from those profits. And outside places, such as teacher pensions, 401ks, union pensions, state pensions, all lose money too. Taking this money from those who funded Amazon via stock purchases and secondary markets would ensure that later there is less investment available for new companies, now jobs, new industries.
Stock markets lets companies get capital to grow and usually employ more people. Taking out these incentives means less companies and less jobs, which means less competition among employers to hire people, which means less wages.
Doing things inefficiently, such as paying lots more than needed to clear wage floors, or paying a worker to do one task instead of two, or similar, means less value in society overall than if the things were done efficiently.