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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

#321

Post by 1123581321 »

mrlala wrote: post #312
bagacrap wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, I still don't see the ethical implications. Is universally lower taxation inherently unethical?

>Is universally lower taxation inherently unethical? When services that take care of people depend on taxes then yeah lower taxation without a backup is inherently unethical.

Efficacy of these services is not a given relative to low tax + charity.

Additionally, lower government revenue should require cuts from other areas first, like military and corporate subsidies. We shouldn’t accept that any of the supposedly missing Apple tax revenue should affect the poor or uneducated. To threaten such seems unethical.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#322

Post by IAmEveryone »

adventured wrote: post #57
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…

> In spite of Europe's larger population, in the past few decades it has produced way fewer new Fortune 500 companies than the US (and now also fewer than China). 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 e…

None of that is remotely true: https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#323

Post by mrlala »

1123581321 wrote: post #321
mrlala wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is universally lower taxation inherently unethical? When services that take care of people depend on taxes then yeah lower taxation without a backup is inherently unethical.

Efficacy of these services is not a given relative to low tax + charity. Additionally, lower government revenue should require cuts from other areas first, like military and corporate subsidies. We shouldn’t accept that any of the supposedly missing Apple tax revenue should affect the poor or uneducated. To threaten such seems unethical.

Not sure how you sleep at night with logic like that, but ok.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#324

Post by Supernaut »

rusk wrote: post #291
secondcoming wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

History demonstrates otherwise. Apple has had facilities in Ireland since 1979. Most of the Apple IIs that were sold in Europe were built in Cork.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#325

Post by iguy »

josefx wrote: post #313
rplnt wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was invalid from the day it was signed Shouldn't then Ireland pay it (or act as if it was paid, and paid whatever it would have paid from it to the EU budget).

> or act as if it was paid, and paid whatever it would have paid from it to the EU budget Yeah, lets treat this as a fine and fine them $1 for every million it cost the other EU members. Lessons learned: you can get away with everything if you are just bold enough. By agreements they signed they are supposed to collect the taxes in a fair manner, so requiring them to collect the taxes they didn't seems to be the leas…

Seems like there's a sovereignty issue here. If you negotiate a deal with the highest authority in Ireland, and they sign off on it, are you done? Why do you have to care what other deals they have made with other parties?

Or is nothing Ireland does binding, until someone else with real power has counter-signed it?

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#326

Post by csunbird »

arrrg wrote: post #243
csunbird wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, adding mandatory payments/taxes such as, social security, health insurance (%7.45 + %7.45 paid by employer), unemployment insurance and solidarity tax, pushes it to 20 percent - 35 percent area, based on your tax class. I am not even talking about the church tax if you are religious. In my opinion, I do not see any difference between income tax and the mandatory taxes.

Mandatory insurance is mandatory insurance, not tax. To claim otherwise is manipulative. I already included the Soli in my calculations and church tax is strictly optional.

My net income/gross income ratio is 0.59, which means an effective tax rate of %41.

Are you sure about that they are not taxes? Those payments are decided based on a percentage of your income and are mandatory, which really sounds like a tax.

Mandatory insurances/payments are taxes in disguise, where you support other people directly for a specific purpose, unlike indirectly for a general purpose. Either way, the state gets the money and distributes it, just like a tax.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#327

Post by nickpp »

tsimionescu wrote: post #287
MR4D wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> When it comes to creating wealth, taxation doesn't do anything but redistribute it. In order to actually generate wealth, you need capital, and people who use that capital more efficiently & effectively will become richer. It is a virtuous spiral. Sure, it's a virtuous spiral if you're one of the minuscule number of people that the spiral is pointing to. Otherwise, you see it for what it is, wealth being siphoned f…

All you have to do to become one of "Them" is to buy a stock share. Never has been wealth creation more accessible than today.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#328

Post by betaby »

petra wrote: post #303
tsimionescu wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How are there 1 million Romanian workers in the UK(since brexit happened)?

1m total, not (necessary) tech workers.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#329

Post by gridlockd »

xyzzyz wrote: post #275
gridlockd wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pure make-belief. You should buy if a purchase is cheaper than renting. Guess what, it never is when interest rates are at zero. Rent is determined by what people with jobs can pay, property prices are determined by what international investors with deep pockets and easy credit can pay. Which one are you? If you are the former, you will be paying down a mortgage that you can barely afford. You will be a slave…

property prices are determined by what international investors with deep pockets and easy credit can pay. The international investors with deep pockets own very, very, very few properties compared to regular people. What if you lose the ability to pay? How secure is your paycheck really? What if you lose the ability to pay rent? How does that make you any better off? Keep your cash, and invest it somewhere else. I ha…

> The international investors with deep pockets own very, very, very few properties compared to regular people.

Doesn't matter, a rising tide raises every boat.

The point is that property prices have diverged from rental income, because low-interest credit from around the world is chasing properties, while stagnant wages imply stagnant rental income.

> What if you lose the ability to pay rent? How does that make you any better off?

I don't have to foreclose.

> I have a mortgage with 75% of the principal left to pay, where the interest on the loan is somewhere between the third and the half of what I'd pay in rent for equivalent property.

Between a third and a half? That sounds like a lot.

> If I was renting instead of paying mortgage, I wouldn't have any cash to keep to invest elsewhere anyway.

So you're saying your mortgage payment, taxes, insurance and upkeep is equal to rent? Where the hell do you live?

> You can also sell your house/condo and move somewhere else, at any time.

At any time? Yeah, good luck with that.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#330

Post by MuffinFlavored »

negrit wrote: post #136
nodamage wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an argument to be made that since Apple is a US company, ultimately their revenue should be taxed in the US. And ultimately that is what happened: the money Apple made outside the US was eventually taxed when they repatriated it into the US. https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-pay-38-billion-in-repa...

I'm pretty sure Apple has an entity in Europe therefor the money this entity makes in Europe should be taxed in Europe.

Is it broken up that way? Do the US sales of Apple get taxed in the US, and European sales of Apple get taxed in Europe?
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