301–310 of 708 posts
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> their net profits to the Polish exchequer I believe that part of the reason is that they still pay other taxes (eg VAT) in the country of sale.
VAT is a tax paid by the consumer, not the manufacturer. If you buy an iPhone, it's you that pays the VAT on it, not Apple.
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The welfare systems (in Europe at least) don't work. They work if you're old right now, but once the young people of today become old they won't get anything meaningful out of it. At least that's the impression I have and everyone else my age has. And healthcare is unavailable anyway. Several month long waits to see a specialist.
So how come the US has worse health outcomes?
53% of Europeans are overweight or obese. The same figure in the US is 72%. That's a 36% difference.
More than that, 17% of Europeans are obese (BMI >30) compared to the US's 42%.
The fact that the US has a life expectancy of 79.1 compared to the EU's 81.5 years with that kind of difference in obesity levels is actually surprising. You would expect it to be lower than that in the US.
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No more so than any other fine the EU raises
If the EU can judge that one country's taxes have been "unfairly low" for the last N years, and take what would have been the tax receipts for the last N years, they can raise a lot more than they do by fines. This is especially true if they decide to do it for all of the businesses in a country, instead of just for a few. I mean, look, the EU is still a place that is more or less governed by rule of law. All I'm say…
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If the EU can judge that one country's taxes have been "unfairly low" for the last N years, and take what would have been the tax receipts for the last N years, they can raise a lot more than they do by fines. This is especially true if they decide to do it for all of the businesses in a country, instead of just for a few. I mean, look, the EU is still a place that is more or less governed by rule of law. All I'm say…
They didn’t do that, they decided that specific tax deals made with specific companies were outside of the law
And I maintain that, to keep it that way, it is good that the money not wind up at the EU, but rather at the member state.
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Ireland gets the money. The EU is making Apple pay us. And yes we didn't want it - mainly for reputational reasons and partly because our argument was "we never done it".
I stand corrected then, thanks. I was under the assumption this is like most legal wins for the EU that it goes into the pot to lower member fees.
Ireland is required to collect the taxes it always should have collected
(but waved to get a competitive advantage for attracting tech giants and giving them in turn a competitive advantage over EU based competition)
as a side note tax benefits to attract companies aren't perse illegal but what Ireland did went far beyond what is healthy/acceptable for the EU
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I think you should be cautious about saying "Ireland cheated the system". The onus is placed more directly on the Irish tax authority, and then more broadly the government, and then more broadly the voting population, and only then the entire population. Consider how the ruling says "Ireland had renounced tax revenue, which had given rise to a loss of State resources". This means many people living in Ireland got les…
> This means many people living in Ireland got less government resources than they would have No it doesn't. Ireland did this deal to benefit from it. What they lost from direct tax in one area they gained in others. Had Ireland not made this deal, it's unlikely it would have become the conduit for Apple profits from around the world. The subject of the ruling contains "concerning tax rulings issued by Ireland in fav…
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Germany was never a significant colonial power and did not extract much value from them. Especially not compared to Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands or Belgium. > Germany has 20x our population, France is not far off it. Neither has anything close to the job market per capita in the IT and Services sector that Ireland has. If you say so. And yet those employees are payed less. These jobs e…
We encouraged or facilitated nothing of the sort. The commission has caved to political pressure and has fabricated a state aid case. The original general court ruling was unequivocal. This ruling has been overturned by the ECJ - absolutely shamefully; with the entirety of their case is that Apple, and Apple alone were the beneficiary of state aid. That is demonstrably untrue.