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136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

cnn.com

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Re: 136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

#41

Post by CommieBobDole »

feoren wrote: post #32
burnafter182 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globalism is inherently fragile. This is part of a continued trend which has enough inertia to carry us to an inflection point where it could conceivably destroy everything human, either in real terms or something less tractable. We made a wrong turn a very long time ago, and since we've been extraordinarily misdirected but inextricably committed to the mistake we've made. We're totally in the dark, and truth becomes…

This is a lot of doomsaying, with no evidence and very little details or logic. It's like you expect your reader to already agree with you and nod along to "mistake" and "misdirected" and all the other negative language you use without any explanation of what you're actually talking about. > We made a wrong turn a very long time ago What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that. Otherwise: what are you talki…

I am as confused as you are; this reads almost like GPT-3 generated text - there are words that resolve to sentences, it scans like real human writing, but there's little to no information communicated.

The breakdown is basically:

* A statement of the premise: "Globalism is bad" without defining 'globalism'.

* Some vague ominous sentences that sound like they reinforce the premise but don't.

* A long paragraph that basically makes the statement "Human lives can't be assigned a dollar value" with no real attempt to tie it to the premise.

* Restatement of the premise.

Re: 136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

#42

Post by throwaway34241 »

brodouevencode wrote: post #35
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate tax in general is the wrong type of taxation. Corporate tax can be controlled by the company itself. If you run your business economically, you pay more corporate tax. This is just wrong.

You, the consumer, pay the corporate tax.

When people talk about the "corporate tax", they're talking about the tax on corporate profits, which belong to the shareholders. You could theoretically tax the shareholders directly instead when they receive those profits as dividends etc (and there might be some advantage to doing so - it's more clear which country taxes should be paid in, and you can have a lower dividend tax rate for people with low incomes).

There's no reason for a company to raise consumer prices in response to a change in the corporate tax rate - if a company can make more profits just by raising prices, they should do so anyway regardless of what the tax rate is.

Re: 136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

#43

Post by TechBro8615 »

lovich wrote: post #23

Did something happen to cause mutual cooperation between most of the planet to be viewed as a bad thing? All these countries have come to an agreement by negotiation instead of economic or martial war. Why is there such pessimism/paranoia about this deal in this thread?

Personally, I'm a strong believer that decentralized systems are more robust than any centralized or distributed alternative. I see no reason why geopolitics would differ from software in this case. In fact, the most effective use case for decentralized software occurs when centralized (geo)political governance creates friction or reduces optionality. For examples, see Napster, Bitcoin, Tor, etc. – their decentralization provides robustness against failure modes created by centralized governance and regulatory capture.

So if the principles of software and politics are already so closely aligned, isn't it reasonable to assume that 136 independent governing bodies would be more robust than one?

Re: 136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

#44

Post by tertius »

brodouevencode wrote: post #35
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate tax in general is the wrong type of taxation. Corporate tax can be controlled by the company itself. If you run your business economically, you pay more corporate tax. This is just wrong.

You, the consumer, pay the corporate tax.

Nope, the tax is paid on the profit (i.e. post consumer).

Re: 136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

#45

Post by tertius »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #34
lovich wrote: post #23

Did something happen to cause mutual cooperation between most of the planet to be viewed as a bad thing? All these countries have come to an agreement by negotiation instead of economic or martial war. Why is there such pessimism/paranoia about this deal in this thread?

Corporate tax in general is the wrong type of taxation. Corporate tax can be controlled by the company itself. If you run your business economically, you pay more corporate tax. This is just wrong.

Yes, but increased profits (by running profitably) also increases returns for the shareholders... A good thing.

Re: 136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

#46

Post by tertius »

RNCTX wrote: post #8
dantheman wrote: post #4

I think this type of harmonization is incredibly harmful and reduces experimentation among states. I personally think the concept of corporate taxes doesn't make sense and encourages reckless behavior - there are a lot of unintended consequences do this. We should be encouraging experimentation in governance. It's the same how inflation doesn't just devalue the currency, it encourages riskier behavior because investo…

I think you're in need of some further reading. 1) UN resolutions don't have any enforcement weight, which is why they're so popular with politicians who run on the statement "nothing will fundamentally change." 2) Taxes should be paid by whoever retains earnings, and in that case corporate taxes make a lot of sense. And yes, buying back your own shares to drive share values higher for current shareholders is "retain…

On #2: Buying back shares does not create individual income. It only creates temporary unrealized gains. Only if those individual shareholders sell, do they realize the gains and, in some cases, will they be taxed on it at income tax rates.

Re: 136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

#47

Post by dantheman »

tertius wrote: post #45
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate tax in general is the wrong type of taxation. Corporate tax can be controlled by the company itself. If you run your business economically, you pay more corporate tax. This is just wrong.

Yes, but increased profits (by running profitably) also increases returns for the shareholders... A good thing.

But you don't increase profits, what you do is spend that money recklessly on R&D that has a lower ROI than if that money was spent outside the company. However, once taxes are factored in the ROI is better than paying taxes due to an increase in the share price.

So what you incentivize is the misallocation of funds from their most beneficial use outside the organization to something in the organization.

Re: 136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

#48

Post by throwaway34241 »

joconde wrote: post #39
feoren wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lot of doomsaying, with no evidence and very little details or logic. It's like you expect your reader to already agree with you and nod along to "mistake" and "misdirected" and all the other negative language you use without any explanation of what you're actually talking about. > We made a wrong turn a very long time ago What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that. Otherwise: what are you talki…

>> We made a wrong turn a very long time ago > What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that. Are there really people who believe that? I've only read it in Sapiens by YN Harari, and it sounded like a ridiculous idea written to provoke thought, not an actual opinion. "Yes, hunter-gatherers could starve on a bad year, and they sometimes got eaten by tigers, but look at how un-alienated they were!" The author…

> I've only read it in Sapiens by YN Harari, and it sounded like a ridiculous idea written to provoke thought, not an actual opinion. "Yes, hunter-gatherers could starve on a bad year, and they sometimes got eaten by tigers, but look at how un-alienated they were!"

The argument I saw put more emphasis on things like nutritional deficiencies after the switch [1], reflected in average male height going from 5'9" to 5'3". Obviously in the long run agriculture became very efficient, but he makes a reasonable case that in the short run individual quality of life went downhill, with the main advantage being reaching higher population densities before being at the limit of the food supply, and so winning any conflicts with hunter-gatherer societies.

[1] http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

Re: 136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

#49

Post by asdff »

telotortium wrote: post #2

I think the tech companies will keep their headquarters in Ireland even after this - Ireland is still not going to raise it's corporate tax rate above 15%, there's inertia, and Ireland is now the only native English-speaking country in the EU (except maybe for Malta).

Is the language barrier really an issue when you have nations like Germany where half the population speaks english? When you consider knowledge worker germans I wouldn't be surprised if this jumps up to U.S. proportions where 78% of the population speaks english.

Re: 136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate

#50

Post by dragonwriter »

joconde wrote: post #39
feoren wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lot of doomsaying, with no evidence and very little details or logic. It's like you expect your reader to already agree with you and nod along to "mistake" and "misdirected" and all the other negative language you use without any explanation of what you're actually talking about. > We made a wrong turn a very long time ago What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that. Otherwise: what are you talki…

>> We made a wrong turn a very long time ago > What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that. Are there really people who believe that? I've only read it in Sapiens by YN Harari, and it sounded like a ridiculous idea written to provoke thought, not an actual opinion. "Yes, hunter-gatherers could starve on a bad year, and they sometimes got eaten by tigers, but look at how un-alienated they were!" The author…

The idea, at least as I’ve seen it a number of places, wasn’t that agriculture was a long-run bad idea, but that for a very long time it decreased the median quality of life (while also greatly reducing volatility in the quality of life for most people, and enabling extraordinary improvements in the quality of life for – again, for a very long time – an extremely narrow elite.)
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