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EU Unveils Plan To Force Facebook, Google and Amazon To Pay Their Fair Share of Tax (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: The European Commission is bringing forward plans to make major multinationals such as Google, Amazon and Facebook disclose exactly where and how much tax they pay across the continent. The plan was expected to include rules requiring businesses earning more than 600 million euros a year (nearly $700 USD) to open up their tax affairs to public scrutiny, revealing their profits and accounts in every country in which they operate within the EU. Since the Panama Papers, a new clause has reportedly been added to require the companies to say how much money they make in so-called "tax havens." A final, more general statement would reveal profits in the rest of the world, treated as a single item. The plans will be presented by Britain's EU Commissioner, Lord Hill, who told the BBC: "This is a carefully thought through but ambitious proposal for more transparency on tax. While our proposal on [country-by-country reporting] is not of course focused principally on the response to the Panama Papers, there is an important connection between our continuing work on tax transparency and tax havens that we are building into the proposal."
If we can have lists of "rogue nations" and "terrorist organisations" that it is illegal to deal with, then there's no reason why we can't also have lists of "rogue tax-haven nations" (like British Virgin Islands) and "tax-evasion organisations" (like Mossack Fonseca) that it is also illegal to deal with.
It should be a serious crime with huge penalties (both monetary and gaol time) to negotiate with or transact business with any government, company or organisation in one of the listed countries, or to own, operate or conduct business with any listed entity in the organisations list.
That would solve the problem at its source.
And before anyone says that Mossack Fonseca is a legal company that provides other services than just setup of shell companies and tax evasion, the same is true of Hamas. They are a huge humanitarian organisation in the Middle East, providing financial and medical aid and other services to those who need it. Unfortunately, they also have a nutcase terrorist militant wing - this gets them listed as a terrorist organisation and no amount of humanitarian work by the majority non-terrorist parts of Hamas will ever get them off that list.
Irrelevant. Do you really feel that multinationals (who are the main drivers of oligopolization in every market they participate in; and whose reach and power worldwide has increased enormously since the Thatcher/Reagan revolution) should be allowed to keep their competitive advantage over smaller companies, just because they can afford to hire the "best" lawyers and bookkeepers? Given that SMEs have to pay, and citizens (whose income comes from something other than cap gains, which is by and large not meaningfully taxed) I see no reason why big companies should be able to avoid it. The playing field is uneven enough as it is.
> More money doesn't fix anything, it just generates demand for
> even more money.
Why can't greedy capitalists ever learn this valuable lesson?
Punish the wealth creators, and they'll stop creating wealth.
Considering all the wealth they create ends up in their own pockets, I'd say it's a fair deal.
Eat the rich.
I am not sure this is about the EU simply getting more money. The general population has had a gutful of large corporations avoiding tax that they themselves can't avoid paying, this in turn is allowing minor parties that speak out against this to bleed support from major political parties, they know if they don't do something soon it isn't the money they have to worry about, it is there jobs.
The whole problem is they are not creating wealth, at least not in the countries they are siphoning money away from, they are doing the opposite. This isn't about punishing them, it is about creating a level playing field where just because you are a multinational that can move HQ into a tax haven that you can't gain a competitive advantage on local companies that have to pay their taxes.
This isn't just a money grab, it's about curtailing extreme abuse of the system. These companies benefit from the services paid for by taxation (infrastructure, education, healthcare, legal system etc.) but contribute almost nothing back. Certainly nothing like what the law intended.
Essentially it's a bugfix to stop people abusing a flaw in the system, like a developer would ship for an MMO if players discovered a way to harvest vast amounts of gold in a way that was never intended.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Punish the wealth creators, and they'll stop creating wealth.
Nonsens. Who do you think are the real wealth creators? The fat cats that sit at the top, skimming the cream off the labour of others without much effort? Or the people who put in a real day's work, whether they are called engineers, hi-tech entrepreneurs, farmers or manual labourers? All of these groups of wealth creators will keep working, because they have to, whether they pay taxes or not; if they don't, they can't feed their families. If your only contribution to society consist in siphoning un-earned money into your own wallet, then you are nothing more than a parasite, and the rest of us would be better off without you.
And thats why the bank account belongs to a shell company. If there is no information on who owns the company the IRS has no way of finding out whose money it really is. In delaware you can create a shell company online in 5 minutes for a nominal fee with zero documentation. I bet half the companies registered in DW are owned by Homer J. Simpson of Springfiels Il.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The ratio of wealth creators among the 1% is probably also on the order of 1%. Most of the super-rich don't create wealth, except for themselves. In my country, recent statistics say that 80% of the wealth of the rich (millionaires and above) is inherited.
Lots of the famous super-rich started that way. Gates parents were wealthy, and the Trump empire was built by two generations (not including Donald).
The real wealth creators are in the middle class. Not the one-in-a-million startups that make billion dollar IPOs, but the one-in-five startups that create a viable, middle-sized company and employ a dozen or a hundred people.
That is where wealth is created. And incidentally, it is also where taxes are the most heavy. Because all the tax breaks that are pushed through with your argument are always for the top.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm starting to realize just how much I missed picking out mistakes in the summary and mocking them in the comments under the old Dice regime. This is definitely a return to form, reminding me of the good old days.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Punish the wealth creators, and they'll stop creating wealth. -- roman_mir
Oh yes, I can just picture it now. "What?!? I'm only going to get 3 gazillion megabucks? But I wanted 5 gazillion megabucks. Sod it all. I'm declaring insolvency!"
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The thing about arguing it that way is that there are two possible solutions, one of which is a lot easier to implement and enforce.
A) Force multinational corporations to comply with the same tax laws as small businesses.
or
B) Stop taxing corporations.
"But B is outlandish! Blasphemous even!" Let me ask you this: Do you believe in taxation without representation? Do you believe corporations deserve representation in government? For most people the answer is no, no. What's the logical conclusion regarding taxing corporations then?
The usual argument people bring up to counter this is that the people who own and/or work at the corporation already have representation - they're allowed to vote, so it's OK to tax their comopany. That argument doesn't fly because those people are already taxed (as individuals) the same as people who don't own or work for a corporation. What's your justification for taxing them more just because they own or work for a corporation?
"But the government would lose billions in tax revenue!" The economy doesn't work like that. All taxation is is diverting a certain percentage of the country's GDP to the government coffers. For the most part, where that money gets diverted from doesn't really matter.* If you eliminated all income taxes and shifted the entire tax burden to corporate taxes overnight, what would happen? Everyone would suddenly have (say) 25% more money, but would their purchasing power increase by 25%? Nope. Companies would be forced to raise their prices to pay for the new taxes, and the price of goods and services they sell would increase - exactly enough to wipe out the 25% extra money people gained. Per capita purchasing power increases can only originate from increased productivity. Taxation is just moving money from one purse to a different purse - it does not affect productivity
Neither do companies for that matter. Companies are just a shell - it's the people who work for that company who generate its productivity. People are the only source of productivity, so ultimately any tax burden is paid for by people regardless of what type of tax you use to collect it - income taxes, sales taxes, corporate taxes, import taxes, customs taxes, all of it is ultimately paid for by people. Think of the economy as a giant donut-shaped swimming pool (in reality it's a web but it's conceptually easier this way), and economic activity as the speed at which the water circles around. Individual people move that water around by paddling it (adding productivity to the economy). A company is just a group of people paddling together. Someone who is self-employed is paddling on his own. Taxes are just a diversion in this donut which directs about 35% of the water into government control, for the government to decide where the water should outflow. But it's always people who do the paddling regardless of whether they work as individuals, work for a corporation, or work for the government.
Eliminate corporate taxes and there's no incentive for these companies to shift income out of these countries. The money stays where it's needed,** and if the company is generating a lot of income in that country, it will keep money in that country to finance its operations. That money gets spent in that country, meaning more income and sales for that country to tax. **The exception would be profits distributed to owners/shareholders. But in a simplified tax structure like this, you could simply assess those people income tax based on (corporate dividend from that stock) * (percent of company income generated in country x) * (income tax rate in country x). Heck, you could even argue that a corporate tax is a simpler way to do just that. The drawback is that a multinational corporation exists in multiple countries simultaneously so a corporate tax creates an incentive to shift income out of countries with higher corporate taxes, whereas an individual can only exist in one country at a time. And