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Germany Urges Global Minimum Tax For Digital Giants (yahoo.com)
Germany is backing a global minimum tax rate as Europe looks to levy tax notably on U.S. tech giants. "Europe is trying to devise a strategy to tax profits from the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and digital platforms such as YouTube and Airbnb which currently manage to keep fiscal exposure to a bare minimum," reports Yahoo News. From the report: "We need a minimum tax rate valid globally which no state can get out of (applying)," Scholz, a social democrat in conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government, told the "Welt am Sonntag" weekly. Digital platforms "aggravate a problem which we know well from globalization and which we are trying to counter -- the shifting of profits to fiscally beneficial regions," said Scholz. Scholz explained he had launched an initiative designed to help states react to so-called fiscal dumping in support of embryonic OECD plans designed to fight tax transparency and cross-border tax evasion. "We require coordinated mechanisms which prevent the displacement of revenues to tax havens," said Scholz. A March proposal by the Commission includes introducing a tax as a bridge measure until such time as the OECD can roll out a measure which can be applied globally.
They can go pound sand
You have to keep in mind Germany's long history of wanting money from *other* countries, and I do mean WWII.
The EU is no different; it's controlled by Germans, their banks are in Germany.
Fair taxes my ass.
They drained Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain out of money.
The EU (at least monetary union) suffers from a similar problem as the US, a large geographic region using the same currency.
But when the European Parliament discussed a tax equivalent to the US tax, Germany who controls the EU and would've been the highest tax payer given such tax, refused immediately.
Meanwhile Germany is doing great while a lot of countries in Europe are struggling.
But expecting anything ethical from Germany is nonsense, from WWII to the EU through the VW diesel scandal.
They just love free money
Arrogant Americans who think the world still revolves around them. The tech giants of the world (and the Starbucks types too) need to pay a fair share of their profits back to the nations in which they do business. I would't care so much but none of these businesses are squeaky clean either - Starbucks with their litter and attendant ecological costs, Facebook with their data harvesting, Apple with their unrepairable ewaste. And so on. Now I know some Slashtard (every cunt on here is oh so clever) will be along to label me as some sort of liberal/communist but I'm actually right of centre. That said, these companies must start paying their way.
Nations, provinces, counties, and cities all have to compete with each other to get people to live, work, visit, or operate a business there. If you are incapable of offering an attractive proposition of benefits vs. costs, then they won't come to you.
The solution is to make yourself more attractive, not to require all your competitors to place the same onerous burden on the people or businesses you aren't attracting.
This is a race to the bottom at best but it's really worse than that. Global companies aren't creating shell companies in obscure countries because these countries are out competing other countries with quality but rather because they managed to find a country that is willing to look the other way because they are getting 1% of a bunch of cash that they wouldn't get otherwise.
The correct solution isn't a global tax but rather to charge taxes based on sales in that country. We already do this with physical goods in the form of either sales tax or import taxes. If Germany wants to tax the iphone or facebook it should tax the company based on the amount of revenue that company is receiving from its citizens.
Try bumping your thinking up one more abstraction level. Who pays corporate taxes? Corporate taxes are taken out of profits. Profits are distributed to shareholders. Shareholders wishing larger distributions (higher profits) insist on lower employee wages and higher prices for products. So corporate taxes are paid for via (1) higher product prices, (2) lower employee wages, and (3) lower shareholder distribution.
There's no need for corporate taxes if you just tax those three directly. (1) can be replaced by a sales tax. (2) can be replaced by an earned income tax. (3) can be replaced by a unearned income tax (interest on savings, distributions). None of these can be thwarted by the Double Irish. (1) yields tax revenue in the country where the sale occurred. (2) yields tax revenue in the country where the company is operating (has employees). (3) yields tax revenue in the country where the owners reside. All bases are covered. The only difference is in the bookkeeping.
The only reason the Double Irish works is because corporations can exist simultaneously in multiple countries. People can only exist in one country at a time, so they can't pull off a Double Irish. So it's easy to eliminate this problem - eliminate corporate taxes and shift them to sales, earned income, and unearned income taxes. The only problem is that a large number of people mistakenly think that corporate taxes have no impact on people, and so feel taxing corporations is preferable to taxing people.
There is no difference - no matter what you tax, in the end a person somewhere pays for it. Taxes are an assignment of a percentage of the country's productivity to the government coffers. And since the only source of productivity is people (everything a company does is done by its employees), in the end all taxes are paid for by people. Get yourself over the notion that corporate taxes are necessary and the Double Irish problem vanishes. Corporate taxes accomplish nothing which cannot be accomplished with different taxes.
Such revolts are never led by the poor; they're generally organized and led by some upper class cunts who wants to put themselves on top.
Yes, people with means can sometimes rouse up the dissatisfied rabble in order to overthrow the existing power structure. This is much easier in nations which are actually impoverished. In other places - like the USA - where you dont have any real poverty, you have to come up with different ways of dividing the people when you want a civil war. Things like race, politics, and religion are usually good for that.
and having people invest in factories, fabs, etc is good for your country
That's why the Cayman Islands are full of factories, fabs, etc...
Tax havens don't work by attracting actual companies with actual headquarters and actual production. Many years ago a journalist went to the Cayman Islands to find all those corporate headquarters. He found one building where a hundred or so international corporations share one office. The kind of corporations that have their own streets named after them in their actual corporate locations.
This is all about money and nothing else. Pure money. Not money tied to any productivity, but the same kind of money you use in speculative derivate finance products. Money completely removed from any economic effect.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org