Apple will start paying $21B in back taxes to Ireland

Great that IE is 12%, but this "competition" is BS in the sense that they needed the higher-tax countries to bail them out just a few years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-2008_Irish_banking_crisis

It's a leak in the EU system, and it needs to be plugged.

Just imagine what a unified income tax rate in the EU would do. (Post-Brexit, although if I were a gambling man, I'd wager that the Brexit will never materialize; A Brexit would sort of be like throwing out your existing post-ww2 source code instead of refactoring. Recipe for disaster).

THEN countries would really need to compete on quality of life and infrastructure to attract (US) corporations to establish show. Amsterdam is happy to welcome all the post-Brexit (see comment above) banks and EU-related orgs, as is Frankfurt.

The EU banking system as a whole was very weak. Optimistically configured you might say. When the economy plunged it sent ripples right across the European banking sector which essentially were contained in Ireland, which as a small economy could take the hit without affecting the rest of the continent.

If you think about it, there's no way the sums that were lost in the banking crisis could ever have been vested in a small country like Ireland. There were creative financial strategies going on everywhere and Ireland was only a single node in all of this.

When you look closer at the whole thing, a lot of the money lost was due to political decisions in the midst of the crisis, rather than purely financial mismanagement in the years before.

Here's a few. Ireland being forced to take on payment of "subordinate" bond holders [0]. The bank guarantee [1]. The failure to nationalise (in time) what was effectively a financial time bomb [2]

Ireland was a patsy for the failures of the European system. As a weak link in the chain Ireland naturally took the fall, and many were outraged for a time, but now in light of Brexit everyone's quite happy to be such a significant debtor.

[0] http://www.thejournal.ie/troika-warned-a-bomb-will-go-off-in...

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/night...

[2] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/government-to-nationalise-an...

The leak in the system is consolidated tax base, not different tax rates. That is, booking revenue (especially digital revenue) from sales across the whole of the EU in a single EU country for tax purposes promotes a race to the bottom. The right answer is to tax in proportion to the economic activity per country - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Consolidated_Corporate_... .

Unified corporate and income tax rates aren't a smart idea. There's no good reason to force one government to be less efficient than another.

Finally, the bailout (and to be clear: loans, not free money, and loans that were paid off early because they had higher interest rate than was available on the market) of Ireland was an indirect support for banks in other countries that had capital surplus for some years, Germany especially. The ECB forced Ireland to prevent bondholders from taking any losses - https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/ecb-refusal-on-bond...