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France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

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Re: France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

#421

Post by ldng »

uasm wrote: post #304
ineedasername wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so any type of tax is justified? That's a straw man. You're leaping from "some type of tax is justified" which is quite a bit more reasonable than "any tax". And if you want to say it's a slippery slope or some such, well, ever single action if extrapolated to the extreme can be a viewed as such. If 3% is reasonable and then it's proposed to goes up and up, fight the increase, not the initial reasonable action. Of c…

> "That's a straw man." No, it isn't. Road tax pays for road maintenance. Municipal tax pays for municipal maintenance. VAT and Income Tax pay for government expenditure. Taxes are collected in exchange for a service. Foreign businesses providing entirely digital services in France aren't actually receiving any kind of service back from the French government. In other words, this specific tax is just a mechanism for…

They do use communication networks and, in the case of Amazon, actual roads.

Re: France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

#422

Post by rorykoehler »

bko wrote: post #15

I never understood the logic behind taxing large internet businesses. The idea behind taxes is that you use some public resource and you pay for that service. You own a home in a neighborhood, you pay property tax that funds the schools. You drive a car, you pay gasoline tax that funds the streets. You hire workers locally, you pay the tax to pay back all the contributions public institutions made to adding the skill…

I'm not really sure it is the role of countries to enrich American shareholders at the expense of their own populace.

Re: France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

#423

Post by dang »

08-15 wrote: post #281
bko wrote: post #15

I never understood the logic behind taxing large internet businesses. The idea behind taxes is that you use some public resource and you pay for that service. You own a home in a neighborhood, you pay property tax that funds the schools. You drive a car, you pay gasoline tax that funds the streets. You hire workers locally, you pay the tax to pay back all the contributions public institutions made to adding the skill…

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. It's against the site guidelines because it makes all discussions the same and nasty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

#424

Post by ldng »

filoleg wrote: post #312
zmk_ wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What competitors will Amazon have in France if all the local competitors cannot escape paying local corporate taxes and Amazons of the word just throw a few millions at lawyers to shop around for the most convenient tax haven.

Ah yes, it is the lack of this tax that was preventing France from having their next Amazon. I am willing to bet significant amounts of money that even in 10 years France will have nothing even of remote resemblance of what Amazon was back in 2010, not even going to set the bar at what Amazon is today.

There is a "French Amazon" : cdiscount. They pay there tax in France. Amazon does not. How is it fair to them ?

Re: France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

#425

Post by dang »

inscionent wrote: post #207
friedman23 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google accesses a market of French advertisers, and that market exists because of French government. Why don't you try justifying that one? Because I posit that if the French government didn't exist the market would exist anyway.

[flagged]

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, and especially not ideological flamebait. It leads to ideological flamewars, which are a low form of discussion that we're trying not to get sucked into here.

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Re: France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

#426

Post by dang »

friedman23 wrote: post #216
inscionent wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How does your comment respond to my question? Your comment adds nothing to the discussion, it's just lazy nonsense that a child could have come up with.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the guidelines yourself. That only makes this place even worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

#427

Post by dang »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #173
glerk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish US companies would take a more forceful approach with these rogue governments. “You get off our back or we pull out of your countries”

Bye.

We've asked you before not to post unsubstantive comments here. We ban accounts that keep doing this, so would you please stop?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

#428

Post by manfredo »

colechristensen wrote: post #373
manfredo wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't spend it when it's parked abroad either. It's less that they're not paying taxes, just that they aren't paying taxes on it yet . By comparison, most European countries don't tax companies on foreign earnings at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_tax_holiday Or they wait for good deals to come up to bring the funds back home at a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile it's easy to get domestic loans based on foreign assets which gives them easy access to spend that same money locally. Put it in safe low yield securities on the other side, take out low interest loans here and profit on the tax money which should have been…

They still pay taxes, though, even if politicians did set a lower rate for a period of time. If they bring the money back in to pay back the loans they'll pay taxes on it.

You call this a "scam" when in reality it's the system working as designed, so I don't think you have a particularly good grasp on this subject. Again, in most countries companies don't pay taxes on foreign income at all.

Re: France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

#429

Post by btilly »

delinka wrote: post #363
fzeroracer wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This typically doesn't happen. Companies don't pass the increases in taxes 100% to the consumer. By that argument all taxes would be immoral since they directly increase the prices consumers pay. Now we can argue as to how much said tax is passed onto the consumer and whether or not the additional tax revenue towards various social services offsets the hit. Which is an important distinction to make when choosing what…

Companies don't receive money from the ether. They receive money from their customers. Ergo, 100% of taxes paid by companies are indeed paid by customers. Any increase will indeed be passed on to the customer. Any decrease in profits to the company is temporary and will be made up by the customers in the near (if not immediate) future. Companies won't just sit idly by while their profits decrease due to tax - they'll…

The fact that the money to pay taxes ultimately comes from customers does NOT mean that increased taxes will be levied on customers.

Here is a concrete example. According to economic theory, the competitive price of a good in a free market should be the marginal cost of the least efficient supplier in that market. If a tax increases your costs but you are (still) not the least efficient supplier, then prices should not change at all, and the taxes will entirely come out of your margins.

This tax is aimed at a handful of large internet-only businesses doing business in France. These businesses are large and profitable in part because they operate very efficiently, and are in competition with offline companies whose operating costs are much higher. It is unlikely that this tax will by itself make their margins higher than the competitors, and therefore is unlikely to make them raise their prices.

What is an interesting scenario, though, is that taxes + GDPR fines + complying with new copyright legislation + whatever else gets dreamed up becomes enough that internet companies decide that it is worthwhile to take a stand and exit various EU countries. They haven't for a variety of reasons (including that corporation vs country battles can make other countries wary of said corporation), but if France keeps picking a fight, those calculations could change.

One of the upcoming interesting battlegrounds along this line is from recent EU copyright legislation. It strongly implies that various tech giants will be required to put software chosen by various national governments on their network to proactively identify and block copyrighted content. Software out of their control that processes everything coming in and has legitimate reasons to "phone home". Maybe you trust countries like France and Germany to only require trustworthy software. But what about more corrupt countries like Romania? Do you trust their copyright filter software to not cross the line into spying and censorship?

Re: France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by US

#430

Post by CamperBob2 »

ripdog wrote: post #28
bko wrote: post #15

I never understood the logic behind taxing large internet businesses. The idea behind taxes is that you use some public resource and you pay for that service. You own a home in a neighborhood, you pay property tax that funds the schools. You drive a car, you pay gasoline tax that funds the streets. You hire workers locally, you pay the tax to pay back all the contributions public institutions made to adding the skill…

Those large tech companies can make money in France because the french government provides all that is necessary for a free, fair and functioning market. How could Google make money in France if there was no french police force, education system, market regulation, court system, contract enforcement? All money made on the white market in any country is facilitated by that government, and taxes are paid on all profits…

Those large tech companies can make money in France because the french government provides all that is necessary for a free, fair and functioning market.

Staying out of the way? They can do that for free.

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