Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 485 posts

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#391

Post by ghostwriter »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #366
ghostwriter wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> essentially robbing the state where the profit was generated. It's a very interesting line of thinking when a company that produces new value and makes money by providing the value to the customers by voluntary transactions (and regardless their location) somehow is considered a robber of the state that produces nothing.

It's a very interesting line of thinking when a government that allows a company to incorporate, protects the company's physical and intellectual property by force and with a large legal apparatus, enforces the company's contracts, trains the company's workers, is somehow considered a robber when they ask the company to pay taxes.

Who is "asking" and who is "taking" in the scenario you mention? The whole notion of "allowing to incorporate", in terms of basic freedoms that a modern society is supposed to maintain and protect, contradicts with the freedom of peaceful assembly and the freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions. This form of right should never require a sanction from a state.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#392

Post by fidelramos »

sjy wrote: post #385
traveler01 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Portugal’s tax take as a percentage of GDP tracks pretty closely to the OECD average. France, Sweden etc have significantly higher rates. https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm

That is true, but Portuguese citizens make a bigger effort to pay those taxes than French, German, Swedish... Tax take as a % of GDP doesn't tell the whole story.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#393

Post by iguy »

josefx wrote: post #379
iguy wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Seems like there's a sovereignty issue here. Ireland signed on to the EU and several trade agreements before that. Until it quits these it is subject to their rules. > If you negotiate a deal with the highest authority in Ireland, and they sign off on it, are you done? Any contract you sign in any country can be invalidated by a court.

> Ireland signed ... trade agreements ... is subject to their rules

Sure. If your employment contract prevents you from taking other work, you may be fired if you break this. You may also have signed up to binding arbitration by some weird court. But normally the 3rd party (your weekend employer, who did not sign) cannot be penalized.

That's what points out how much sovereignty has been given up by Ireland. It has signed up something much more than a trade deal. A foreign court can not just strike down laws it passes, but re-write them retrospectively a decade after the fact.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#394

Post by avianlyric »

anonymousDan wrote: post #363
avianlyric wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU has, it has some very strong rules/laws that prevent many forms of state aid (frequently brought up as a reason why countries should leave the EU). These rules/laws are given force via international treaties signed when countries join the EU, including Ireland. The EU are say that Ireland’s laws break these EU treaties, and are thus invalid. There’s probably some valid questions regarding why the EU acted now,…

Well no, the EU just lost the case. Taxation is not an EU competency. The court case was about whether Ireland gave taxation opportunities to Apple that were unavailable to other companies, which was shown to not be the case.

Specifically the case was whether or not the tax benefits provided can be considered a form of state aid, clearly EU courts don’t think they can. But I suspect that the EU commission will appeal this ruling, and maybe they’ll win the appeal.

If the current tax situation is anything to go by, no government anywhere is competent at taxing multi-nationals. The US made loud noises about the EU trying to force Ireland to tax Apple, but only because the US wants the tax revenue instead, but even the US hasn’t figured out how it’ll actually get Apple to pay more tax.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#395

Post by 627467 »

zeroimpl wrote: post #384
iguy wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a way to tax corporate profits in proportion to the amount of VAT, property tax, employment taxes, etc. already paid in each country. Wouldn't it be simpler just to tax those things? We already collect those taxes, and can set any rates we wish. Why not just abolish the the tax on corporate profits?

I don’t necessarily agree with your conclusion, but I do think it’s important to emphasize that Apple is collecting VAT across the EU and paying large quantities of money to all EU countries as a result. The amount of tax revenue generated by VAT will be an order of magnitude larger than income tax, since the former is on revenue and the latter is on profit.

Yet, VAT is not Apple's money, it's the end consumer's.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#396

Post by angus-prune »

iguy wrote: post #325
josefx wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The highest authority in any modern deomcracy should be the rule of law.

What you're advocating for is despotism.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#397

Post by bodono »

throw0101a wrote: post #272
ogre_codes wrote: post #258

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…

Your quotes are from the decision that was just overturned, ie, the commission was found to be wrong. The fact is those taxes were legal and not preferential state aid, as was just ruled.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#398

Post by abnry »

sokoloff wrote: post #268
fennecfoxen wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's "good for workers as workers" and "good for workers as consumers". Walmart and Amazon are very good for workers-as-consumers, IMO.

Your point is often missed and I wish it was stated more often. However, I think the current sticking point for many is that, while their wage may allow them to buy more consumer goods, it is a lot harder than it used to be to pay for housing and health care.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#399

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sideeffffect wrote: post #341
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…

This problem has a rather profound solution: Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Consolidated_Corporate_... Companies should have never been taxed based on a virtual, and fundamentally nonsensical, figure as the location of their headquarters. They should be taxed based on substantial things, like (the location of) capital, labour and sales. This is what CCCTB establishes. Stat…

> Companies should have never been taxed based on a virtual, and fundamentally nonsensical, figure as the location of their headquarters. They should be taxed based on substantial things, like (the location of) capital, labour and sales.

This is fundamentally the right answer, but don't underestimate the political difficulty in getting there.

Taxing "profits" in the location of the headquarters was always a seduction. You have an international company paying developers in California, manufacturing products in China, selling them in Germany, but if their headquarters is in France then France gets a cut of the profit from all of that whether they had anything to do with it or not. Very nice deal for France.

Until Ireland sets a lower rate and the company moves their headquarters there, and then the crying starts. No, it was a stupid way to tax from the start, not when they moved the headquarters to Ireland.

But you tax capital and labor and sales, well, the implications of that are different. Now if they have operations and employees where you are, they can't avoid the tax, except by moving out. But uh oh, if the taxes are too high they might do exactly that, so now you've got to worry about the rate again if you don't want to lose jobs to other countries. Or your people would have to accept lower salaries to keep that from happening. And on top of that if you lose the jobs you still lose the tax revenue.

The company also can't avoid taxes on sales if they want to sell to your people, but if the company wasn't in a monopolistic industry to begin with then it could easily be the customers paying most of those taxes and not the company.

So the taxes get paid, but so do the true costs of taxing things heavily. The free money everybody always wanted was never really available. And there may be some wailing and gnashing of teeth as people figure that out.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#400

Post by xrd »

ghostwriter wrote: post #365
sideeffffect wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem has a rather profound solution: Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Consolidated_Corporate_... Companies should have never been taxed based on a virtual, and fundamentally nonsensical, figure as the location of their headquarters. They should be taxed based on substantial things, like (the location of) capital, labour and sales. This is what CCCTB establishes. Stat…

> essentially robbing the state where the profit was generated. It's a very interesting line of thinking when a company that produces new value and makes money by providing the value to the customers by voluntary transactions (and regardless their location) somehow is considered a robber of the state that produces nothing.

Doesn't the state provide roads for Amazon, and schools for the children of kids employed at the subsidiaries of Apple? I know there are a lot of details in which "state" (of all the bureaucracies) does that, but is Europe somehow exempt from that arrangement? Is your concern with the EU taking this action instead of Ireland? Isn't that going to be a race to the bottom, where "states" try to out do each other in tax breaks? And, if the cynicism is warranted, aren't lowly paid civic employees going to be outgunned by high paid corporate lobbyists in the end?
Post reply on HN