EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business

Looking at you, Ireland.

I don't really like this kind of idea because it really goes against a kind of fundemental freedom. "If you don't like it, you can leave".

Instead, laws around making sure that the profits generated from a countries citizens are taxed by that country make more sense to me. A lot of laws around that already exist, and I suppose a lot of people would say that they have not been effective.

A lot of it comes down to the treatment of Intelectual Property. A lot of the tax games that companies play relate to licencing their IP around between different countries. I wonder what would happen if a country tried banning licencing of IP between related parties internationally?

I wouldn't call a 15% tax on corporations "communism". The actual policy objective is reasonable even if many can argue both sides with rational debate.

The main problem is this idea that a bunch of people on the liberal side of the Western world can create "global goals" and try to strong arm the rest of the world into following, which then leads to the inevitable outrage and disappointment when the rest of the world does not follow. And yet it never seems to happen in the other direction -- e.g. Africa deciding on global rules and then trying to force Europe to follow them, assuming they have a right to set global goals. The global goals only flow in one direction.

The idea that corporate tax policy is something that countries outside of the EU have actually thought of, and are doing their best to address in their own way, and for their own purpose, is something that never occurs to these self-described "global planners" who are in reality deeply provincial and trapped in their own micro-culture.

It is also something that people on the other side of this debate have thought of, which is one of the reasons not to tax corporations at all, but to tax those who receive the profits of corporations and that are domiciled in a particular tax jurisdiction. There is a lot of self-contradictory results when you try to tax the business separately from the owner of the business -- for example, a corporation can deduct interest payments but not dividend or share repurchases, when all three are basically the same thing, and a corporation has the option of doing all three. So this incentivizes corporations to take on debt, which then promotes financial fragility. Lots of distortions happen in a vain fight against "tax loopholes", when the real problem is that you are trying to tax the company separately from the owners.

So then you say, "I agree that trying to define 'profits' is prone to tax loopholes, so I will tax corporate revenue". Good idea! But then you will penalize business that have high expenses, e.g. a retail store that buys an item and sells it for a 20% markup would be driven out of business by a 15% tax on sales. So you say, "I will tax revenue net of input prices". And all of a sudden you have a value added tax, which is a form of sales tax, which is regressive. And then people complain about that regressivity and say "we should be taxing income instead", which was my original point!

So you keep chasing your tail because you are making decisions without really thinking things through, much like the decision for the EU to cavalierly set "global goals" even as it's relative importance is rapidly shrinking, even as Asia is pretty much ignoring all these goals because they are following their own interests and don't care about EU global goals.

Okay. In that case the cutoff was around $80,000 in today's money, which is certainly not poor (but not rich either).

The only difference is, I suppose, the fact that one comes from a people that got very close to experiencing the "social justice paradise" and the other is just a made up phrase by an internet troll. Otherwise, they are practically indistinguable.