161–170 of 485 posts
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Wow, really? 20000 EUR per square meter, for small apartment in Munich? That's... more than I expected.
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.
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Yes and that finding has just been overturned.
Are the facts in dispute or just the legality of them?
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>Here's a very non-random book I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce... According to Wikipedia, that book makes the argument that economic equality will grow over time. It doesn't show that countries with more economic freedom grow slower. To copy from the "Criticisms" section of that wiki page: " According to Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, he merely assumes that inequality mat…
The danger of inequality is not something new, and the problem isn't that someone is super-rich, the problem is that median purchasing power is going down, because economic growth is not going into the hands of the lower and middle class, and this is causing demand to fall in the market, leading to an inevitable economic downturn. The dangers of this were discovered a century ago during the Great Depression, and are…
A pie chart has 360 degrees. Give 359 to a small subset and you are left with 1 degree to be fought over. You cannot have super-rich people without having super-poor people. Look at the world, the real one, this one here where the majority of people are dirt-poor.
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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. Given the tax loopholes that are often taken advantage of, I would hardly say that the countries or cities they reside in are beneficiaries in as far as tax income, though they definitely have a hub effect of drawing people into the locations they are in. Whether that is…
>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…
And if you look at the class disparity we have in the United States, the middle class is almost completely gone now.
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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.
Why is that? Like, on the US west coast, ballooning home prices makes sense because their cities are in valleys with a fixed amount of land, but munich looks like it has a bunch of farmland around it that could be converted into housing increasing supply and thus decreasing prices. This coming from someone in chicagoland which has 9.5 million people but housing isn't crazy because the metro area sprawls 30-40 miles o…
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I live and work in Munich and I have to pay half a million euros for a 25m^2 box. EU is cheaper than US is a fallacy.
Doesn't really make sense to buy at this price point though. Looks like one can rent an apartment of that size for 1200 EUR a month in Munich.
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…
Apple has been in Ireland since the 1980's. A large fraction of an entire city (Cork) depend on it. It's not hard to imagine that Apple has contributed far more than $14bn to the community, and country, in that time. And it's not a figure-head office either, it has assembly lines. Countries aren't all identical. Ireland needs to be allowed tune its economic policies based on what it has to offer. It doesn't have the…
Furthermore, in the case at hand, while Ireland is free to set their tax rate to something low, like 12.5%, it needs to apply this to all companies, not allow any of them to fiddle their way to only paying 0.005% like Apple did. The commission considers this illegal state aid to a company, and I'd tend to agree. It's unfair competion when a company only operating in Ireland needs to pay 12.5% in corporate tax, while an international company with a creative ownership structure involving the Cayman Islands can pay effectively 0%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifti...
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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.
Why is that? Like, on the US west coast, ballooning home prices makes sense because their cities are in valleys with a fixed amount of land, but munich looks like it has a bunch of farmland around it that could be converted into housing increasing supply and thus decreasing prices. This coming from someone in chicagoland which has 9.5 million people but housing isn't crazy because the metro area sprawls 30-40 miles o…
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It sort of is. And isn't. It's a helluva mess we've got ourselves into. Ireland has built its modern economy on being attractive to multinationals. And it's worked. 10 MNCs alone pay 40% of all tax revenue in the country. They've brought jobs and wealth to a country that was previously big in dairy & emigration. For the generation above me, the career path was study, leave, earn your money elsewhere - and perhaps com…
Is it a race to the bottom though? I mean, a race to the bottom in the normal sense is cutting taxes or spending money on attracting these companies. We help these companies evade other countries' taxes, not our own. Also, officially, the entities involved in the tax evasion are not related to the entities that actually employ people. Would Google move it european customer support offices without this tax deal? Theor…
There are other benefits to being in Ireland. We have a common-law legal system, which is more familiar to Americans than most continental systems. We mostly speak the same language. We're still in the EU, etc.
How much of a presence you need here to make it work, I'm not entirely clear on. But it does seem apparent to me that once you're maintaining a presence anyway, it knocks down the largest barrier to actually building on that presence.
For example, it's widely assumed that Apple are only here for the taxes. I think they were originally here as a low-cost entry into Europe. But however it's worked out, last I heard Cork was the only factory (or perhaps the only factory outside the US?) that Apple actually owns. I'm typing this on an iMac that was assembled in Ireland. Apple are a success story - even more so because they're in Cork, rather than everything but everything being built in the Dublin bubble (a separate but very real issue).
And taxes aren't the only incentives; I used to work in a building that was sold to DEC (by the Irish Development Agency) for 1 Irish pound - which would have been $1.45 when we left the pound in the 90s. Not sure what it was worth when we sold the building, but .. probably still a close approximation of pocket change. And again, it paid off - it sounds like a story of us "bending over for the yanks", but the site passed through DEC to Gateway to HP to HPE. What started off as a factory for Digital is now stuffed full of developers for HPE. We haven't just had decades of employment out of that deal, but the value of that employment has been constantly rising. Ireland's modernisation is the result of thousands of such stories.
But as for a race to the bottom, it sort of is. Factories are being built in Central & Eastern Europe today, for most the same reason they were being built in Ireland in the 70s and 80s. Just as we were trying to undercut France, Germany & the UK to get our leg up - they're trying to undercut us to do the same. I do think there's a point where we need to "pivot" to actually acting like a modern economy, and let other nations take our rung on the ladder - instead of having to lay claim to one even further down.
I do agree with the idea that our modern economy shouldn't still depend on being a pseudo tax-haven. I just don't think "hit them as hard as we can" is the right solution, especially while we're still riding on their backs.
(To make this look a little less rant, I'll cheer it up with a fine example of a PDP that does not say Maynard on the front)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtape#/media/File:DECTape_un... https://www.flickr.com/photos/32614724@N06/3045263847
