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EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

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241–250 of 266 posts

Re: EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

#241
post #125
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For VAT this is already defined (in the EU): wherever the purchaser is when they get their goods handed to them. If I drive over the border to Germany, I pay German taxes. If I buy online and have it shipped to the Netherlands, I pay Dutch taxes. A digital good is handed to me wherever I am when I purchase it, so I pay taxes in that jurisdiction.

If you sell concert tickets, would this mean that you need to book the profits in the respective countries of anyone anywhere in the world?

A concert ticket is not a digital good. The service is given to you at the concert itself, therefore the country in which the concert is, is the country where you will pay taxes.

Re: EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

#242
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I would not even mind a "no double citizenship" rule.

That would be just shitty for kids. Your parents are from A and B, but live in C. A and B are hard to enter without citizenship and impossible to live/work in long term without it. If you limit multiple citizenships, you basically kick the child and limit their family access without any reason in that situation.

In your scenario, a C-only citizenship child with an A parent and a B parent is no worse off than say his peers who have C-only citizenship, and whose parents have C-only citizenship, too.

It's not like any of those C-only peers could easily visit or move to A or B, either, based on how you've described their policies.

If anyone is worse off in that scenario, it would be the C-only children with C-only parents. Those families are pretty much stuck dealing only with country C, no matter what. The multi-citizenship family, on the other hand, could potentially benefit from the ability of a parent returning to A or B for a period of time, for example.

You seem to be mistakenly portraying the family with more options and flexibility as "victims", when in practice they're actually much better off than others are.

Re: EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

#243
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of both. I don't mind corps being taxed if that's what a country wants to do. I do have a problem with making this a "global government mandated" thing though. And as I mentioned in other comments, I despise the revival of the communist vocabulary ("reactionary", "bourgeois", "social justice", "equity").

Survivors of an abusive relationship might struggle with the fact that their partner told them that they ‘loved’ them, and yet that supposed love took the form of cruelty and abuse. They might struggle to trust anybody else who talks about ‘love’. But that doesn’t mean that other people who use the word ‘love’ are secret abusers.

A participant in an abusive relationship can move back to her parents any day, all she needs is a bus ticket. For a person born under Communism the best case is to go to the Gulag if he tries to cross the border.

It gets better, in the USSR until the early 70s the peasants were not even allowed to leave their villages. Technically, they were simply not issued passports which were required to register themselves to live in a town.

I bet nobody in your family was born within the reach of the Commies. In places such as the US the people have always been free to go if they felt marginalized. To another state or even abroad without asking the government for permission. So you fail to conceptualize what it means when the Socialists come to power.

Re: EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s weird that individuals are taxed on revenue but corporations are (usually?) taxed on profit.

Not really. If you imagine a supply chain with raw materials at one end and finished products at the other, if every step along the chain is taxed even a small amount on their total revenue, the cumulative effect would completely dwarf the value of the final product. To solve this, in most countries, companies are taxed VAT instead, so intead of taxing the total value of product at every step, you are only taxing the…

> Not really. If you imagine a supply chain with raw materials at one end and finished products at the other, if every step along the chain is taxed even a small amount on their total revenue, the cumulative effect would completely dwarf the value of the final product.

Yes, and that’s why it’s weird that the most important resource for most big corporations is taxed like that. All the human labor gets taxed based on revenue and not profit, unlike all the other raw materials.

Re: EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

#246
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tax companies that are currently hiding profits in tax havens. > No single country can do this I don't understand. If America already has a >15% tax rate, then it already abides by these rules. America is not a tax haven.

As one of the states in the USA, Delaware is probably the largest tax haven in the world.

Companies in Delaware still have to pay the 21% federal corporate tax rate. Well above the EU rate this article is lauding.

Delaware is popular to incorporate in for legal reasons. It is not a tax shelter.

Re: EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

#247
I’m not an Economist, but doesn’t such a tax lower a firm’s ability to pay its employees (by hiring more or increasing wages) or decrease the firm’s ability to pay dividends to shareholders or force the firm to raise prices.

Generally, it seems like a way to collect more revenue from the population while hiding it as an indirect tax. And it seems a bit like a regressive tax that hits everyone. The fact that they want it to be global makes me feel that they don’t want to compete with other countries that may have “better” economic policies -— whatever that would mean.

Re: EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was trying to invent some “fair taxation scheme” I’d tax the profit based on the revenue in that country. So if a company had $100B global revenue and $10B global profit and 0% of the profit was in France while 10% of the revenue was in France, then the company should be taxed based on the $1B profit that can be attributed to France based on revenue there. Any other scheme seems it’s prone to creative licensing…

If you're trying to do fair taxation do away with "profit" taxes entirely. Not like any of us plebs get to dodge taxes by spending our income. Subtract what the company spends on salaries from its total revenue and then charge them 20-30 percent of the remainder just like the rest of us pay. "Corporations are people" after all. Toss in a seven percent sales tax on all stock purchases.

Get rid of income taxation altogether and replace it with land value taxes.

Re: EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

#249

This isn't really as big a deal as it's been made out to be, IMO. This is Pillar 2 of the OECDs tax reform for corporations. Pillar 1 is much more interesting, and would require corporations to actually book profits where they are made (so not putting everything through Ireland for example). This will have a much bigger impact imo than this 15% ruling, because right now there are a bunch of tricks you can use to get…

The DST is much much better than Pillar 1.

Re: EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

#250
post #164

This isn't really as big a deal as it's been made out to be, IMO. This is Pillar 2 of the OECDs tax reform for corporations. Pillar 1 is much more interesting, and would require corporations to actually book profits where they are made (so not putting everything through Ireland for example). This will have a much bigger impact imo than this 15% ruling, because right now there are a bunch of tricks you can use to get…

Is this a tax on profits? If so, I worry it will remain weak to hollywood-accounting attacks: it's easy to spend money until there are no 'profits'. I'd really love to see progressive taxation of corporate revenue: the bigger a company is the higher the tax rate. Huge corporations benefit from economies of scale, so there is an incentive for power concentration. This power concentration is bad for society: it deliver…

> it's easy to spend money until there are no 'profits'.

It depends. In some countries it is easy, it others it isn’t. Depends on what can be counted as an expense and what part of that purchase can be accounted for in a given fiscal year depending on when it was purchased…

For example. Germany. If a company buys computer equipment in December, they cannot deduct 100% of the value for the fiscal year that is about to finish because that computer equipment cannot be reasonably used for the whole fiscal year. So a company can deduct 1/12th of the value. Of course the reminder can be deducted in the following year but the profit is already affected for the previous year. And don’t get me even started on advance taxes companies have to pay.

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