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When the people complain about the European union taking too much autonomy, this seems like a pretty good example. It seems crazy to me that Ireland is "not allowed" to set taxes as low as it would like to attract foreign investment. Even states in the US can freely do that!
Ireland allegedly used to do this quite a bit back in the day.
When the people complain about the European union taking too much autonomy, this seems like a pretty good example. It seems crazy to me that Ireland is "not allowed" to set taxes as low as it would like to attract foreign investment. Even states in the US can freely do that!
The Amazon HQ2 campaign is a pretty good example how companies are using tax competition to instigate a race-to-the-bottom. There's no doubt that Amazon would house these employees somewhere. So the payoff is essentially zero-sum. All that's changing is that Amazon is playing different populations against each other to save on tax.
Rules against such behaviour are just an effective method to avoid a prisoners' dilemma by the most obvious method known to anyone playing the game: communication, and binding agreement.
Now there is an argument that some locales may need to use tax policy if they are behind in every other feature, i. e. education, infrastructure etc.
But in fact the EU is a rather successful model of flexibility in that regard: Just look at the incredible economic success of eastern Europe and the Balkans after the end of the cold war, or Portugal, or even Ireland itself. Just compare Belarus to its EU neighbours to get a sense of what's possible.
How did this work? The EU does allow for tax incentives or subsidies where regions need to catch up. They also created an enormous system of direct transfers to allow investments into the factors that make regions competitive, such as infrastructure or rule-of-law.
As a matter of fact, Ireland simply agreed to the rules, and their scope isn't a matter of any "natural law". If countries agree to conduct themselves by certain rules than that's that. Of course every single rule may occasionally diverge from what any single country would otherwise do, or the rule wouldn't be necessary. But, just as with any intentional law, these rules taken as a whole have empirically been extremely beneficial to its signatories.
Fuck off asshole. Playing to the limits of tax law is fine, but acting outraged when it backfires on you is lame. You played, you lost, suck it up.
You have to hand it to the Irish. As a plan to collect more tax in the long term, offering (effectively) tax free status by not enforcing "Double Irish w/ Dutch Sandwich", to attract big players, letting them dig themselves into tax-debt holes for a few years while letting them feel they will get off scott-free, then enforcing it and securing a deal to get back-taxes paid, is pretty genius. Very stable genius to help…
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-apple-taxavoidance/ire...
You have to hand it to the Irish. As a plan to collect more tax in the long term, offering (effectively) tax free status by not enforcing "Double Irish w/ Dutch Sandwich", to attract big players, letting them dig themselves into tax-debt holes for a few years while letting them feel they will get off scott-free, then enforcing it and securing a deal to get back-taxes paid, is pretty genius. Very stable genius to help…
You have to hand it to the Irish. As a plan to collect more tax in the long term, offering (effectively) tax free status by not enforcing "Double Irish w/ Dutch Sandwich", to attract big players, letting them dig themselves into tax-debt holes for a few years while letting them feel they will get off scott-free, then enforcing it and securing a deal to get back-taxes paid, is pretty genius. Very stable genius to help…
This is wonderful news. Let's hope they go after Google, MS, and all the other tax dodgers out there after this.
You have to hand it to the Irish. As a plan to collect more tax in the long term, offering (effectively) tax free status by not enforcing "Double Irish w/ Dutch Sandwich", to attract big players, letting them dig themselves into tax-debt holes for a few years while letting them feel they will get off scott-free, then enforcing it and securing a deal to get back-taxes paid, is pretty genius. Very stable genius to help…