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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.
Please, do understand what "Double Irish" means concerning taxes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Double Irish:
Adobe Systems ...
Airbnb
Apple Inc.
Facebook
General Electric
Google
IBM
Microsoft
Oracle Corp.
Pfizer Inc.
Starbucks
Yahoo!
Crab people?
When they run out of "creative" ways to collect tax revenue expect them to fall back to simple technical means of controlling data flow to foreign countries. In the name of preserving equality, naturally.
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. :)
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.
No. People need to be able to vote with their feet as a last resort. Escaping even the sweet-talking charismatic overlords who rise to power in a democracy is a necessary right. Democracy is a means to an end, and is not the end itself, which is the freedom to pursue your own dreams and make your own life better.
There should never be a world government (Sorry, my fellow Star Trek nerds) because then there is nowhere to flee to when (not if) it goes bad. And that means not beginning to internationalize forced tax rates.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Liberal, of course meaning, what Americans call "neocon-libertarian"
Nonsense. A neoconservative believes in "left" big government domestic policies combined with "right" hawkish and interventionist foreign policy. This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of libertarianism. So "neocon-libertarian" is a completely meaningless term.
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...
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
In other places - like the USA - where you dont have any real poverty
*cough* * cough*
Living a sheltered life in America are we? There are pockets of poverty in America as abysmal as anywhere else in the world. I would even add that the percentage of Americans feeling economic stress (not poverty, but being threatened with instant poverty) is very high. Much higher than any casual look at financials would reveal. Hell, 90+% of Americans are threatened just by getting sick.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen