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.

Comments

Oh Americans... We don't. Not like you.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to realize that our "being religious" has nothing to do with your "being religious".
It's only on paper. And only because we have no separation of church and state, and so if you are born, you 1. automatically default to the religion of your parents, and 2. the Catholic and evangelical churches, and *only* them, *literally* have a state tax, that is deducted from your salary, unless you actively opt out.

Literally nobody, but a few very old people and a couple of nutjobs, goes to church.
Very often, not ever for marriage.
Look at how people in Germany reacted, when "popular YouTubers" Silas Nacita and Conner Sullivan came out as a "child rapist" (quote from the comments)... err, "religitard" (another quote from the comments). They ripped him apart in the comments.

To us, you Americans and the Saudis/IS are in one category: Religious nutjobs.
No offense. Just describing how it's seen over here.

So no, the only people in Germany, that would qualify as religious, according to the US definition, are the radical Muslims, and the radical Christians. It's always funny, to see how long a Muslim immigrant lasts in Germany, before he succumbs to that delicious, delicious pork. :)

Re:The US will never agree to this

[ShanghaiBill]

EU does not need to ask permissions how to tax countries selling to their consumers.

Yes they do. It is a blatant violation of WTO rules to tax American products differently based on their origin. So they have to craft this carefully so that only American companies pay the tax and no European companies are inadvertently snagged, without explicitly saying that is their goal. One way to do this is to penalize "bigness", but that is clearly a contrived distinction, so expect this to be vigorously challenged by the US in the WTO courts.

Scholz's words will come back to haunt him. He is basically admitting to designing an illegal tax policy. It is hard to claim you are not intentionally targeting Americans when you have already clearly stated that you are.

Wasn't that the point of the EU

[rsilvergun]

to make a large enough organization to tell the US to go fuck themselves? Funny how there's this campaign backed by billionaires who make liberal use of tax shelters to kill the EU...

US is a high tax country. Ireland is the target

[raymorris]

Germany is complaining about countries with LOW corporate tax rates. The US has HIGH corporate tax rates.

Germany's corporate tax rate is about 15%.

The US corporate tax rate was 35% federal plus average 5% state = 40%, among the highest in the developed world. That's why most large "American" companies have their official tax headquarters and much of their operations in Europe - they'd rather pay 15% tax rather than 40%.

The tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) reduced the U.S. rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Plus 5% state, so now it's 26%, still almost double the German rate.

The target of this is Ireland. Though their nominal rate is 12.5%, they allow BER that results in an effective rate around 1%.

The US would LOVE for Europe to have higher rates, similar to the US, so that "American" companies like Dell, Apple and Amazon would have less incentive to pay their taxes in Ireland, instead paying them in (and to) the US.

The problem is, most every country other than the US recognizes that receiving tax revenue is a good thing, and having people invest in factories, fabs, etc is good for your country. As Barak Obama said "if you want people to do less of something, tax it". The US taxes investment. They have high taxes on factories, fabs, development centers - companies - because apparently they want people to do less building of companies in the US. Other countries aren't so stupid. They WANT companies like Dell, Google, and Apple to put their operations in their countries, so they don't tax the hell of that like the US does.

Time for pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation?

[shanen]

So far everything I have seen in this discussion (both above and below this 'insertion point' for this comment') has been mindless regurgitation of stupid lies and complaints about the lies. Just the place for an appeal to first principles in search of a well reasoned debate. ROFLMAO.

What we have now are tax systems that reward corporate cancers for becoming as huge and cancerous as possible. Insofar as there is any pretense of justification, it always comes down to "bigger is better", so the profits MUST increase.

I regard that as an insane anti-solution in search of a real problem. There will NEVER be any profit that "solves" the fake problem because there is always a larger number. Cancers always kill their hosts. In this case, corporate cancers will eventually kill the societies that are hosting them. Or maybe they already have, and we're just walking dead and about to discover that our extinction is the natural resolution of the Fermi Paradox.

Strangely enough, I think there is a solution, and the Germans seem to be on the right track. However I think it is better if your think in terms of pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation. As market share increases, so should the tax rate on your profits. This is NOT a penalty for success, but rather an incentive to split the company into competing companies that will take the good ideas into different directions, while simultaneously giving us MORE choices and MORE freedom. The basic objective (per my sig) should be to make sure there are around 3 to 7 choices in play for each shopping decision, not the 1 or 2 choices that the profit maximizers demand.

What we have now is a pro-greedom taxation system. America just has the greediest and most dysfunctional version of it.

Time's up, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.