381–390 of 467 posts
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You can expect whatever you want, but no middle class person pays as little as 25% in Europe, only the wealthy and the desperately poor get away that cheap.
I'm middle class and that's about what I pay (effective tax rate) in Germany. It's a bit less actually.
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>dump corporate tax altogether and simply enforce a global flat tax on all forms of personal income No thanks, you have no right to tell us (Switzerland) how much taxes we have to pay. First fix your own US-tax-system. EDIT: I think he meant that: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/11/bidens-plan...
Agreed, trying to get the whole world to agree on a single tax rate (0 or otherwise) is unrealistic, and completely ignores the sovereignty of countries to design their tax system as they please. What needs to happen is a modernized way to calculate which percentage of global profits from each company are taxable in which country, and then leave it up to each country how to tax that (or not). The current system lets…
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>Another, more radical approach is rethinking the idea of public wealth. The currently ongoing collapse of monetarism is, perhaps, an opportunity. Tax public companies x% of their shares per year. 1. this disproportionately affects companies with higher capital requirements than lower ones. Think spacex compared to a SaaS. 2. this doesn't solve the underlying issue of moving to a jurisdiction with lower taxes. let's…
>> disproportionately affects companies with higher capital requirements How/Why? >> underlying issue of moving to a jurisdiction with lower taxes Well... nothing simple solves this in full. However, "loophole" in this article works by attributing income from IP licensing (an internal transaction between Apple owned entities) to Ireland, which does not consider this a taxable transaction. A "share tax" would apply to…
Because a company's value (and therefore its stock price) is determined partly by how much assets it has on hand. A company that's capital intensive by definition bring in less money for the same amount of capital invested. Think how much money you need to invest to get spacex off the ground (r&d, rockets, manufacturing facilities, etc.) and how much profit it brings in, compared to how much investment a SaaS needs (a laptop) and how much profit it can bring in (hundreds of thousands? millions?). Under a tax scheme that taxes based on company's shares, a 1% tax would get you 1% of spacex's IP, rockets, and manufacturing facilities, but a 1% tax on a SaaS would only get you 1% of their laptops.
>A "share tax" would apply to the same entity that shareholders own a stake in, it doesn't try to disentangle subsidiary structures.
So the US would end up getting 1% ownership of Microsoft USA, which makes zero profit and sends all its profit to Microsoft Bermuda. Once they're about to lose control because they bled too many shares, they'll cut off doing business with Microsoft USA and start doing business with Microsoft America (a newly formed company) instead.
>Companies might try to list on Bermuda's stock exchange. I wouldn't discount that possibility, but it won't happen overnight.
It might not happen overnight but I guarantee it would happen within the year.
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> Why on earth do you think its fair for US based organizations to spread across the globe, reap the huge profits from that but funnel all the cash back into the US Random guess, they're American :-) Facebook, Google & co. are absolutely ravaging local economies, pardon me, disrupting legacy economies all over the world and a small chunk of that ends up as compensation in the US. The rest of that, FAANG are just sitt…
I'm not from US. And it works the same for most countries, it just happens that those companies are based on the US and very visible, but if there is a EU corp that's heavily successful and all the development is done in EU why wouldn't the profit be booked in EU? (Other countries mostly have sales, that's what sales/vat are for) If instead of being a digital company it was a physical good company, would it be so con…
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>Also I think it's pretty disingenuous to assume that MS wants to see computer courses taught in school to drive down the cost of labor. So, what's another good explanation as to why software heavy businesses want more software engineers? It seems to me that it's to increase supply to lower costs. If the claim is that they can't capture enough, they can raise comp even more to capture people who don't work in their b…
Remember that Microsoft also benefit from more other businesses becoming software businesses, and it seems like more people in the workforce knowing at least the basics of computers would help with that.
In Europe they've bribed most of the school systems so computing is basically just Word and Excel.
What is the solution to this? I've wracked my brain and can't come up with anything. Companies will just continue to flee to whatever country is now offering 0%. Christmas Island has a new 0% corporate tax policy? Let's go buy a mailbox there and move our "headquarters". The old-school thinking is that low corporate tax policies encourage business, creating jobs in the process and boosting that country's economy. In…
Does a corporation want to sell their products and services in country X? Very well, they must agree to the following regulation. The country X reserves an option to, at any point in time, buy up any subsidiaries or parts of the corporation, for value based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). For example, if the accounting profit of Microsoft Germany is $0 over the past decade, the country has an option to purchase Microsoft Germany for its fair GAAP price - $0. After doing this, the country also has an option to reverse the trades the subsidiary has done. So, if Microsoft Germany sold its IP to Microsoft Ireland for the total value of $100, the country X can buy it back for $100. Repeat with Microsoft US, Microsoft UK, etc. The shareholders will be left with their extremely valuable (according to GAAP) Microsoft Ireland and Microsoft Singapore.
Any sufficiently large country with sufficiently motivated government can pull this off. No revolutionary overhaul of the existing tax system is necessary. The regulation is clear and fair. But again, it's never gonna happen.
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I'm middle class and that's about what I pay (effective tax rate) in Germany. It's a bit less actually.
As I wrote elsewhere, if you make below 50 k in Germany and your wife isn't working, I don't think that's a very comfortable life style.
Edit: I just want you be clear here. I think the tax rate is way too high even at 25% effective tax rate. The system is overburdening poor people no doubt about it but I also think we should not fudge the numbers by claiming we pay the top tax band rates as effective rate because it invalidates whatever else we say after that. It’s dishonest. IMO effective tax rate should be <5% and actually 0% for most of us.
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400 CHF/month. If it doesn’t cover emergency care, then what good is it? You can’t really call it health insurance.
Wow, 400 CHF is a lot! NL does guarantee emergency treatment will be provided, and the excess above the deductible will be paid by the insurer. Aside, I’ve had friends who moved and found that Swiss income taxes are also much lower than NL in most cantons. Is that true in your case too?
As an American, it gets harder to live in Switzerland because of the lower tax rate and high COL once you break through the foreign earned income exemption.
This is really, really, really a problem. I know a lot of us make decent money and we write large "checks" to the government because we're in high tax brackets, but seriously. The middle class has gotten smaller. If you live in a city a house costs a million dollars. Many people don't have adequate healthcare. Yet we are allowing the richest people in the world to have astronomical profits and pay no tax to help cove…
What do you recommend as a solution? Do you honestly think if MS and a few other companies paid more in tax things will magically get better? Do you trust the government to send that money properly? The problem runs much much deeper. This is only scratching the surface.
So do I think governments having more money NOT by squeezing me and all those I live near more is a good thing? Why yes, yes I do.
The wealthiest being job creators is bullshit. It's always been bullshit.
Microsoft is anti-consumer. Fuck them, let them pay taxes like the rest of us.
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Better yet, dump corporate tax altogether and simply enforce a global flat tax on all forms of personal income, both capital gains and salary. The amount of human time and energy wasted on taxation is mind bogglingly stupid. Politicians trying to influence the behavior of their minions by designing these convoluted "tax-based incentive" schemes is the whole problem in the first place. Just tax all money that comes in…
> simply enforce a global flat tax Enforced by whom? Why would a developing country want to tax companies at the same level if they're trying to attract investments? Anyway, why should any country listen to any other country on what the tax rate should be? Why should a company be forced to pay tax on foreign income if the country in which they supposedly made that income doesn't want to them to pay taxes? The worst p…
The point of removing corporate tax is to not tax companies at all. Remove the decision of how to position your country against others altogether.
You could enforce these things by creating a free-trade area for anybody who joins, and excluding or putting stiff tariffs on those who don't.