611–620 of 708 posts
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What a timeline we live in where the EU is basically telling Apple that they weren’t smart enough with their tax evasion - “see if you did it like other FAANG you could’ve gotten away with it!”
It should be said that loophole was supposedly closed in 2015, after prolonged pressure on Ireland and the Netherlands.
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The opposite, no? The government accepted _much_ less money than is required in exchange for jobs for their constituents. This is an example of a government prioritizing benefits for some of their constituents (emphasis on some) over the collection of tax dollars (direct benefit to the "government") or monetary reward for themselves (corruption).
Apple settled on Ireland precisely because of that tax scheme. Had Ireland levied taxes at a normal rate, they wouldn't have gotten any dollars. The choice for Ireland was between jobs and nothing. Apple (& al) played countries out against each other and had Ireland not done it another one would've. It's a tragedy of the commons, and as always, that can only be solved through collective action (cue TFA).
If companies did that - it's illegal. If government politicians do it - their populism brings them votes.
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> The Netherlands does the same stuff just not as successfully Well, that's absolutely not orthogonal to the "screwing over Europe" statement. That simply makes two countries trying to gain an unfair competitive advantage. Nicely hypocritical from the Netherlands by the way, as they are always the ones on their high horses complaining about the financial laxness of the southern and eastern European countries, while a…
Regarding the Netherlands, It looked like they where working and making good progress of dismantling this system. But in the end it was all a façade and feet dragging... Now I just hope that with our current government it wont get worse. But hey, we voted for these muppets. So if the EU again fines us we deserve it.
Hope dies last! Let's see how long the current government holds. And hope the replacement would be better...
Eventually Apple will pull out of Europe and I’ll be sitting back laughing my ass off.
As a European, I find the tech situation in Europe (and UK) horrible - much lower salaries for tech workers, inconsistent and high taxation, no measurable innovation in tech since forever. At the same time EU wastes taxpayer money on "research" that is only slightly more advanced than a second year student's project, all in the name of promoting innovation.
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Or not. If their competition doesn't raise prices, maybe they won't either.
If the tax raises all of their costs and it's a competitive market then they'll all have to raise prices, because competitive market = competitive pricing and it has to come from somewhere. The most common case where it doesn't raise prices is when they don't have any competition and are already charging the monopoly price, so the money has to come from the company because if there was any more to extract from the cu…
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> This retroactive application of a principle not explicitly required by law at the time of the tax rulings is unfair and creates legal uncertainty for businesses. I don't see any problem with this. They knew they were gaming the system, and knew they could get in trouble for it. The law is NOT a computer program where all outputs can be fully predicted from the source code - it also takes common sense into account.…
I expect to see very abusive definitions of 'gaming the system' under such a law such that anything which is the slightest inconvenience is viewed as gaming the system. Just like how common sense isn't common.
* to be fair, this varies with legal system: my personal opinion is that one finds significantly more successful rules lawyering attempts in common law systems than in code systems.
Good. Not because I particularly dilike Apple or big US tech firms (I have a whole bunch of Apple stuff right here), but because Ireland has been able to undermine the tax regime of the whole EU, by giving these sweetheart tax deals to big firms, who can then run their entire EU business from there. This gives an unfair tax advantage to the multinationals over homegrown EU companies, skewing the market. Is it Apple's…
Good. Because I do particularly dislike big US tech firms who don't pay their taxes and have absolutely no problem owning that emotional capital. This corrects an injustice and seeing that happen makes me feel better, without any need to rationalise or appeal to economics. btw: I also agree with your economic reasoning
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If you don't like then... uh... come back?
You're free to renounce American citizenship to escape future tax obligations. Anyway it's not an issue for non-rich expats, you just have to file a tax return which shows you owe $0.
In theory, yes. I knew someone having a heck of a hard time doing so though. Here's the process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relinquishment_of_United_State...
It's pretty expensive and difficult.
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And it's wrong when they do it, too.
So we should correctly call it "european corpspeak"
When you do shit to bend and avoid complying with the rules as much as possible, you don't get to complain about uncertainty on application of said rules.
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If you don't like then... uh... come back?
God I hate this argument. This is such an unhelpful, useless thing to say. It doesn't provide any useful or practical suggestions, it's just a way of shutting down conversation.
It is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relinquishment_of_United_State...