281–290 of 501 posts
I never understood the logic behind taxing large internet businesses. The idea behind taxes is that you use some public resource and you pay for that service. You own a home in a neighborhood, you pay property tax that funds the schools. You drive a car, you pay gasoline tax that funds the streets. You hire workers locally, you pay the tax to pay back all the contributions public institutions made to adding the skill…
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Because protectionism isn’t only economically bad but also immoral. You can’t force everybody else to pay higher prices. Supporting your own companies at the expense of the rest of the society isn’t good. You’ll be forcing consumers to pay higher prices for a completely nationalist reason. No reasonable economist would favor protectionism.
Morality is subjective and open to interpretation. Sometimes consumers should pay higher prices to avoid unwanted externalities.
What do you mean by unwanted externalities? Unwanted by who?
Part of me originally wanted the US to retaliate since this theoretically threatens my paycheck, but a 3% tax on revenue generated within the country is pretty low and seems reasonable considering how ineffective taxing profits is due to loopholes. I really don't think it's sour grapes so much as trying to address the Irish/Luxembourgish tax schemes
A tax on revenue is very different than a tax on profit.
A reasonable middle ground would be to tax google on their central profits and take a cut based on the fraction of business done in France. That way no tax would be owed if google makes a loss, regardless of French revenue.
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Which is actually a good idea: increase tax on revenues for companies using tax-evasion schemes until it is no longuer profitable for them to continue doing so. Also, consider the fact that tax evasion is a crime in most countries and that this is a very bland measure when compared to what these companies (and their executives) really reserve.
increasing taxes makes tax-reduction-strategies _more_ profitable, not less also, tax-evasion and tax-reduction are two different things, equating them is an argument in bad faith
I beg to differ, the only difference is that one is by definition illegal and the other is by definition legal. Tax reduction can mean chasing tax incentives responsibly, which is fine, but can also mean deliberately engaging in weird financial engineering that violates the spirit of the law but not the letter.
Like if I max my 401k and HSA, get a $600k mortgage to max out the mortgage interest deduction, and count all my professional electronics as business expenses I am reducing my taxes but I am following the spirit of the law because I am reducing my tax burden by making decisions that tax policy is meant to encourage. If I incorporate in the Cayman islands and declare all my income through a Virgin Islands subsidiary operating through Panamanian bank accounts so that I can sell off shares of my business to a trust which I also own, all so I can turn personal income into capital gains earned in a different country even though I do my actual business and live in the US, I would definitely be violating the spirit of the law.
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not sure what you mean
Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. Companies like google can charge their profitable branches in other countries royalties to use Google software or platform moving the profits out of a higher tax country like France into Ireland where there's little to no tax. Even after they patched the Dutch part that allowed even the marginal Irish taxes to be avoided companies can still artificially lower their profit by transf…
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Because it's short sighted to over tax your citizens from both sides?
To this extent, countries compete on taxation and value-add for services. Perhaps country A charges more in taxes, but offers more education to its people, and a more educated workforce to hire from, while country B offers fewer of those amenities in exchange for lower taxes. Inter-country competition helps to keep them honest, and corporations get to choose the luxury of where they operate from and do business out o…
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Don't you think that a company might just raise their prices to pay for those taxes?
It's up to them to figure out where's the right trade off to maximize their gains.
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> Those large tech companies can make money in France because the french government provides all that is necessary for a free, fair and functioning market. How could Google make money in France if there was no french police force, education system, market regulation, court system, contract enforcement? Also, those large tech companies can sell to French customers because French customers have money to buy from them.…
Don't you think that a company might just raise their prices to pay for those taxes?
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that's the point the French are bringing up. French companies pay French taxes. Internet companies serve French markets, take French money, but pay taxes elsewhere, and often they pay no taxes because they can shop around to find a friendly tax haven that doesn't charge them taxes. This is only possible because internet. So, they're imposing a tax on companies that serve French customers via the internet but aren't b…
Why isn't the solution then to force all companies doing business in France to register with the French government and pay taxes on the portion of revenues derived from France?
What happened to a company who has no physical presence in France refuse to pay the tax on the ground that France has no jurisdiction upon them? Ordering French ISPs to block the web service of that company thereby breaking the fundamental human right of freedom of speech and no censorship.
I'm not sure that fundamental right is correct, at least, outside of America. There's no fundamental human rights of freedom of speech and no censorship in New Zealand for example, as enshrined by law.