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Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

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Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#471

Post by rapnie »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #354
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…

> Sadly, there are few states that are successfully blocking this: Netherlands, Ireland, Malta, etc. I.e the ones benefiting from the current regime, and to lose in the reformed one.

I'm Dutch and ashamed we are in these lists. Regular folks in The Netherlands don't really benefit too. Can't find it now, but I read a study some time ago that without our current tax paradise regulations we'd be better off. I suspect these things are mostly kept in place by enterprises and people in higher positions who successfully lobby the politicians.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#472

Post by myspy »

jonfw wrote: post #107
myspy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

A CEO getting many times richer, even minus his worth in shares, is still the truth.

No "normal"employee/worker is achieving that. And he's working equally hard.

I think saying that other jobs are worse and amazons are so great so people should shut up and be happy is the wrong idea.

Instead we should strive to make all jobs better and when jobs are shit no one should be forced to do them. That's a goal humanity should achieve.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#473

Post by throw0101a »

rplnt wrote: post #283
throw0101a wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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).

> 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).

The EU is not getting paid anything. The EU said that Apple should have paid Ireland more.

It's like the EU saying to Germany "we thing that you are giving an unfair tax advantage to BMW compared to Renault: you need to collect more taxes from them".

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#474

Post by throw0101a »

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?

> * 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?*

When joining the EU, Ireland promised to have (tax) policies consistent with certain principles. The 'side-deal' with Apple alleged (according to the EU) broke those principles.

If Ireland doesn't want a higher authority looking over them they can leave the EU. This is one of the arguments made by the Leave side in UK Brexit: we don't want Brussels breathing down our necks.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#475

Post by opo »

zanny wrote: post #306
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…

Who you tax is more important than how much you tax. If you levy your tax burden entirely on the poorest aspects of society than of course its going to look bad. The US is largely socialism and profits for the corporations and free market absolutism and costs for the working poor.

>...The US is largely socialism and profits for the corporations and free market absolutism and costs for the working poor.

These kinds of statements don't really add much to the debate - they sound like political slogans. To add to some light instead of just heat to the discussion, it is better to explain what you are saying. How are you defining poor? What tax rate do you think this group should pay? What tax rate do you think corporations should pay? How does that compare with other countries? etc.

(I don't mean to single out this particular posting, as I have seen political slogans used throughout this thread.)

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#476

Post by fidelramos »

dahauns wrote: post #453
fidelramos wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Er...I might be misunderstanding something here - but it literally does? Something like tax rates statistics wouldn't tell you whether those taxes are actually paid - but tax revenue statistics do exactly this.

I will provide a clarifying example:

Imagine a person in Portugal has a 1000€ salary, and the state takes 40%, the person has 600€ to live.

A person in Germany gains 3000€, the state takes 60%, the person has 1200€, double the Portuguese.

Cost of living in Germany is higher, but not twice that much. And the cost of living already factors in some taxes, such as VAT, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#477

Post by iguy »

angus-prune wrote: post #396
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?

The highest authority in any modern deomcracy should be the rule of law. What you're advocating for is despotism.

The rule of law is a nice aspiration, but it has limits on large-scale cases. For instance I'm sure these laws about illegal state aid could logically imply a conclusion that would result in (say) Airbus going bust. And if the judges ever tried this, the laws or the system would be changed to prevent it. Those with real power would not permit this outcome.

And I think cases like this €13bn tax bill are half way there. Did it really spend 12 years working its way through neutral courts, like some slow squabble over who inherits the family pizza parlor? Or was there a bit more political input now that the EU feels that US tech giants are a geopolitical threat, in a way that they didn't 12 years ago?

And so the sovereignty question is not just on whose soil the high court sits, and who writes the nice rules it officially follows. It's about who gets to decide which big cases to let slide, and which to go after.

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#478

Post by kazinator »

> Dutch MEP Paul Tang called the ruling "deeply unfair".

"I suspect that many people in Ireland think... 'Why is there a company that pays 0.05% in taxes?' I pay more taxes than Apple, for that matter. Many people pay more taxes."

Does this guy pay nonzero tax in Ireland at all?

Would he pay more tax than Apple if he resided in Ireland?

Or is he just saying that he pays more personal tax than Apple somewhere on the planet (such as, oh, in the Netherlands) and therefore Apple should pay at least that much in Ireland?

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#479

Post by holoduke »

speleding wrote: post #242
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.

With mortgages in the 1.5-2% range, a 600K house would cost you €750 - €1000 a month in mortgage payments, and that's not even taking into account tax benefits you may get. That's an absolute steal compared to what you would pay in rent in a place like Amsterdam or London.

little late, but not true. 600k equals to about 2000 a month in mortgage payment

Re: Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned

#480

Post by holoduke »

thehashrocket wrote: post #164
logicchains wrote: post #58

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…

They pay more in the Bay area. Once you get out of the Bay area the pay goes down. Facebook even said if you telecommute they'll take into consideration where you live and pay you based on that. And if you look at the class disparity we have in the United States, the middle class is almost completely gone now.

last year I drove from Nashville to Miami. passed by many small villages. middle class is still there. maybe you should get outside of the city to see it yourself.
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