471–480 of 567 posts
Germany is probably the last country on earth you want to found a business in. Bureaucracy Bureaucracy Bureaucracy and these damn workers rights, arrrr those evil Germans!
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why you acting like its not true now??? it still economic powerhouse (at least best on continent)
All major German companies have been bleeding money and announcing layoffs like crazy in last years.
This will cost for a while and then work again.
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I don’t understand the question. Governments collect tax in lots of different ways: income taxes, sales/consumption taxes, import taxes, capital gain taxes, property taxes, inheritance taxes, etc, What’s so special about capital gains taxes that requires the government to have had some sort of active involvement to be justified?
Capital gains are theoretical. You do not have that as money, but the state does want it as money. They are not what someone paid for your assets, they are what someone THINKS someone else might pay. Most smaller companies cannot be sold easily, and of course, the government is unwilling to take that as the valuation being zero (because what someone is willing to pay right now is in fact zero). And the government is…
I think you're confusing a capital gains tax with a wealth or asset tax.
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Not to mention pfic rules making simple index investing impossible.
Does that affect individuals investing in ETFs through a brokerage account? I thought you only needed to provide information on the total value of each brokerage account?
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Paying taxes is good, lawful, even patriotic. Also good and lawful is moving a company somewhere where you'll pay less in taxes and can grow faster and hire more people (and is at worst patriotically neutral). An exit tax is a country saying "oh no that's bad , so instead of looking at our tax structure and seeing why you're leaving and trying to address that, we're going to charge you >3 years of profit as a punishm…
> Also good and lawful is moving a company somewhere where you'll pay less in taxes Agree, to an extent. You (the company) should still pay taxes on profits made within the country, before they can move out the company from the country, anything else would be unfair. > It's simply saying that if our taxes are too high for you we're going to charge you even more to try to stop you from leaving You can move company for…
This is not what exit taxes are. They are punitive taxes above and beyond what you've already paid on revenue earned within the country.
> If you're moving the company because the taxes are high, it sounds perfectly reasonable that you'd pay taxes before moving the company, otherwise it becomes a tax hole.
Again, it seems like you don't actually understand what exit taxes are.
If you earn money in Germany, you're going to pay taxes on that no matter what. Even if you leave, and the exit tax is zero, you still have to pay the income tax on that revenue.
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> fair share Pretty sure “fair” means both sides agree that it’s fair. You can’t just say “I think it’s fair that I take a half of what you made”. You could say that people know what the conditions are before starting the business, so they implicitly agree that it’s fair if they start. But this article exactly explains what to expect because people don’t know it beforehand, and thus they now can make better informed…
No, because the rich will always be greedy. They already pay the lowest taxes proportionally to their wealth/income (yes I know in absolute numbers they pay the most, but that's because a billion is about a million times bigger than a thousand - can't believe I have to explain this every time, or somebody will point out the absolute numbers like it negates my point).
However high taxes ensure that it’s becoming more difficult to become rich, and only rich can get richer.
Personally I think it’s better when more people can become rich, not fewer.
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Does that affect individuals investing in ETFs through a brokerage account? I thought you only needed to provide information on the total value of each brokerage account?
Yes it does, basically all foreign etf’s are PFICs.
This means lots of additional reporting work plus 49€ per ETF yearly for tax preparers.
US really hates expats.
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There are many ways to make consumption taxes not regressive. You can implement refunds up to certain threshold. You can use the revenue to fund services used by lower income families. You can tax luxury good at higher rates. EU countries already realize it's the case with IT services (everyone wants their share with digital tax) and with big supermarket chains (big issue in Poland). It's just painfully slow for them…
> There are many ways to make consumption taxes not regressive. You can implement refunds up to certain threshold. You can use the revenue to fund services used by lower income families Every one of those "solutions" is just a patch on the basic problem that consumption taxes are fundamentally regressive. Go tell someone living paycheque to paycheque that it's okay, you'll get a rebate every quarter for the extra tax…
There are arguments to be made against heavily taxing consumption to encourage economic activity, but you're oversimplifying this by disregarding the indirect costs of alternatives and looking for problems instead of solutions. Not that I think the one you commented on is a good one.
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No reasonable person on the planet can look at that table showing a €700k exit tax on a company making €200k/yr profit and think "yeah that sounds fair."
The article admits that the 700k figure “assumes the worst-case scenario that you take the high valuation of the financial authorities (factor 13.75) as base valuation for your exit tax. Instead, you could also find someone to assess the real value of your company, which is likely lower…” A reasonable person could absolutely think it’s fair to impose a very high exit tax on someone who doesn’t want their books examin…
I was someone who almost got hit by this tax. You don't need any offshore shenanigans to get around it. If you just want to move out of the country you can also just keep the ownership of the company within the country. You do this by putting your shares into a holding that stays in Germany even when you move out. That holding needs to be managed within Germany, so you need to assign a friend or be in Germany twice a…
Ah great, not so bad then! So you just need to: - Form a German holding company to manage the business - Deal with any conflicting taxation/regulatory issues when operating a german holding company from your new country of residence (in some countries this is not trivial) - Visit Germany twice per year and potentially more to deal with German authorities that require things be done on paper and in person (hope you di…