[flagged]
Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big
41–50 of 567 posts
Re: Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big
#42[flagged]
Yes globalism is bad :) outside of certain forms of trade. Next up, remittances.
Re: Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big
#43[flagged]
While rather sarcastic, your comment does hit an interesting point: How much does the infrastructure and society of any given state contribute to the "building" of a company? I'd argue that, for software companies, not very much; at least if you contrast it with a hardware company. If you're, say, forging steel, you're using roads, trains, a lot of electricity, you've got an industrial plant, worker unions, public ac…
It looks like education is cheap.
Re: Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big
#44[flagged]
I think most people would be okay with an exit tax if it's reasonable. Requiring the owner of a business generating €20k in profit to then pay €70k in taxes is not reasonable.
Canada also has an unreasonable exit tax. Canadian founders are taxed on 50% of the FMV of their shares on departure. So if you own half of a company that is worth $50m, your taxable income for the year of departure is increased by $12.5m.
Re: Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big
#45[flagged]
Perhaps you would apply the same logic to a family car, or the clothing you bought? Should they tax the value of your medical degree when you leave the country?
Yes.
Remember that in Germany you don't pay for University degrees. High education isn't just for a wealthy minority.
Re: Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the right color pen. God forbid you fill in an official form in the wrong color pen.
I would think it's a joke but once literally had an office clerk in Germany scratching with fingernail my signature to check whether it's by pen and in the right color.
Signatures that can be erased easily aren't a great fit for a legally binding document.
For more information, you can check whether the ink complies with DIN ISO 12757-2 and/or read up on "Dokumentenechtheit" [1]
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dokumentenechtheit (It hasn't been translated to other languages yet.)
Re: Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big
#47[flagged]
You'd have a point if Germany did anything to actually support businesses scaling instead of trying to kneecap them at every turn
Re: Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big
#48[flagged]
Presumably you paid for that infrastructure in the form of taxes while you did business in the country. Why, then, should the state have additional claims on the money you made? Were the taxes they collected already not enough?
In Germany only 40+% of your income goes to taxes and social security. Plus another meager ~20% on most things you buy. Plus a small tax on many things that are supposedly bad for you, like ~70% on cigarettes. Death is taxed at a discount, only 15-40% depending on how rich you were.
"Free" healthcare though. It's a bargain!
Re: Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would think it's a joke but once literally had an office clerk in Germany scratching with fingernail my signature to check whether it's by pen and in the right color.
There's a reason why Kafka wrote his novels in German.
Because he was German Bohemian? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudeten_Germans#Austria-Hungar...)
Re: Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably you paid for that infrastructure in the form of taxes while you did business in the country. Why, then, should the state have additional claims on the money you made? Were the taxes they collected already not enough?
That's not what the exit tax is, though. The German exit tax is effectively just a way to give the existing capital gains tax a way to tax unrealized gains when you leave the country, to prevent you from dodging taxes on capital gains by simply leaving the country. In other words, it's not an additional claim. It's simply an enforcement mechanism for the money you already hypothetically owe.
Yes, that's true, but the implementation is.. not very elegant.
In theory, the exit tax should ensure that Germany gets the taxes of the sale of your company. So, if you ever sold your company once you're no longer in Germany, Germany wouldn't get those taxes, so it charges you immediately once you leave Germany in a sort-of "virtual" sale.
This, of course, sucks tremendously because you actually haven't sold your company, and "normal" people don't have this sort of cash on hand.
Other countries have "smarter" exit tax implementations and only charge you when you actually sell your company in the future. I think that's pretty fair. It also doesn't hinder people from leaving the country.