That will solve absolutely NOT A SINGLE ISSUE , but it’s just another income to feed the bureaucracy.

Thanks to the three countries that stopped this madness.

PS : i also find it outrageous that gafa don’t pay taxes, but let’s fix the tax heavens in Europe then. Don’t start making special taxes on revenue ffs.

EDIT : changed "income" to revenue.

>They’re just a bunch of jealous incompetent insufferable pompous politicians than don’t understand a thing about the private sector

Talking about knee-jerk reactions.

I strongly dislike this type of empty populist diatribe, that's how we give up on democracy and end up with incompetent fools at the government, just out of spite. Screaming "tous pourris" is not improving anything and is frankly insulting for the many elected officials who are genuinely trying to improve things. Regardless of what they did or didn't do there would be people like you who scream bloody outrage because they're obviously stupid people who understand nothing about nothing. Meanwhile you're not the one trying to balance the budget of a country within the EU.

>let’s fix the tax heavens in Europe then

And how do you propose we do that? Have Le Maire go to the various tax heavens (which in this particular instance would have to include Ireland) and tell them to tax more? How many bottles of Bordeaux would he have to bring to seal the deal?

Having a uniform tax code across the EU would be awesome but it's not like we're anywhere close to something like that.

This revenue tax won’t change anything. It’s just ransom, and i hate feeling like my representatives make me look like a lazy thief.

I’d even prefer something like what china is doing : since google is a monopoly in europe, which makes it impossible for competitor to compete, let’s impose tarifs or prevent them from doing business in europe as long as they haven’t split, or a true local competitor has emerged. At least this would be very specific to one very particular case. Not the kind of gigantic tax on a whole economy.

The problem is when things require unanimity. It's very hard to get all 28 countries to agree to something.

Here in the USA we have an analogous situation, but it is maintained - for at least a century and a half - with enough top-down brute force to keep the resulting tensions simmered-down such that they are only expressed via things like the "culture wars" phenomenon.

The parent's point was that a) is not true for Google as a search engine.

b) doesn't seem to be true either; while money and experience can make you provide better search results, you don't get an advantage just from a high current percentage of searches.

In a trivial sense you can "SilasX has a monopoly on SilasX's labor" or "Joe Schmoe has a monopoly on hot dogs sold at Elm & Main St". That's not the monopoly anyone cares about. What matters is whether it's difficult to bring online the alternatives to employing my labor or buying a hot dog in that vicinity. In that respect, Google's monopoly on search is not the worrisome kind of thing we associate with monopolies.

The argument is that large market share cause user capture. It is relative trivial to bring online an alterative youtube, but video creators can't switch unless the audience also switch and the audience can't switch unless the creators also switch. A subpar job by youtube won't automatically mean that competitor can disrupt, and a lot of users, content creator, advertisers, basically every type of users has been cited as disliking youtube but being locked in with no realistic alternative.

a) it's easy for users to switch

For google search, online stores that use google for advertisement and getting new customers can't easily switch as that would result in abandon 90% of new customer. They can't just buy their hot dog elsewhere. Online stores have to deal with google, unless their customer base is located elsewhere.

I'm trying to outline a useful definition of "[bad-]monopoly" that captures the stuff we generally care about when we worry about them.

It's important to have a definition that excludes "they're just unusually good and so people happen to be currently buying from them, purely as an issue of merit". (If Joe happens to be the best hot dog vendor on some intersection, that's different than if he can prevent others who want to from opening shop nearby.)

I said Google doesn't count as the kind of bad-monopoly because they're easy to switch away from, and the market share isn't self-reinforcing.

It doesn't follow that Google is easy to take market share from. That could be the case of "legitimately good at what they do", and is not how you should define a worrisome monopoly.

A company being so good that others can't gain market share isn't (necessarily) a bad-monopoly. Only if that difficulty came from the factors above, would it count as a bad-monopoly.

(Those factors being the vendor lock-in and the self-reinforcing aspect.)

the ability of member states to set their own taxes is about the only protection they have handling down turns and getting new industry. their currency was given up and without the ability to print money they need other means to mitigate adverse changes to their economies. it is one reason Greece was trapped so long in their misery, bound up by EU laws and stuck with a currency they had no control over.

In the US it works by forcing states to compete on regulation and taxes which benefits everyone. because onerous taxation on one group will certainly follow with others because once that line is crossed it becomes to easy to keep doing so. Indirect taxes are a politicians best friend because you have ready bogeymen and no apparent affect on the public though in reality they are paying the end result

>In the US it works by forcing states to compete on regulation and taxes which benefits everyone.

Everyone except the environment at least, it's often the first regulation to go. This kind of competition gives an edge to rich people and big companies who can afford to relocate if they dislike the way they're taxed or regulated somewhere, meanwhile low-skilled workers and small companies can't generally move a thousand of km away on a whim.

In Europe this is even worse because we have cultural and language barriers. Even for an educated worker moving from London to Berlin to Paris to Prague is not a simple thing at all. The only ones who benefit from this infighting are large companies and rich people who can more easily relocate their income in order to get the best deal possible.

See the whole Amazon HQ2 thing for an example of that in the US, you end up with a huge company getting great benefits that no small player could ever dream of. How is that fair and how does that benefit everyone? How does tech giants moving to Ireland to pay less taxes benefit everyone? It benefits Ireland arguably, but overall the EU gets less money than we otherwise would.

I mean just for the sake of the argument we could imagine that the EU as a whole would agree to tax these tech giants a certain amount, bigger than what Ireland makes them pay now. Then we give the Irish exactly the same amount they're currently receiving and we redistribute the rest within the EU. Wouldn't we be objectively better off in this scenario?

Now of course that would be a weird arrangement but you see my point, the real winners here are Google and Facebook, not Ireland, Germany or Poland.

Please don't take this the wrong way but: There's a whole body of tax-literature and tax-philosophy that renders such a statement naive.

How do you figure e.g., how the current money Ireland makes is linked to the increase or decrease of tax-rates? How is it linked to other factors making Ireland worthwhile to invest? How much was Ireland accumulating on those other factors, because it has been a tech tax haven so long? How much future growth of these factors is taken from Ireland because of your proposed regime? And how do you deal with a decrease in overall EU tech tax income (per country) because of your proposed regime? Would you e.g. go so far as to pay Ireland its current income even if the overall EU tech tax income would be lower? Would you otherwise grow Ireland's pay with an increased overall EU tech tax income, beyond Ireland's current income, and if so what would be Ireland's fair share?

And while those questions can have multiple correct answers, those questions have to be answered in a consistent way, because rule of law. And that consistency alone is often enough a problem, because other countries have other consistencies their taxing has to apply to, again because rule of law. And those laws are usually not just paper, but codifications of hundreds of years of cultural norms and customs.

I mean the EU, the free market, the euro, all that doesn't have "hundreds of years of cultural norms and customs" behind it. Why couldn't we go further? The only thing that we've had consistently over hundreds (or even thousand) of years in Europe is warfare and royal inbreeding. If we could avoid having to invade Ireland or having our finance ministers wed each-other in order to settle this tax dispute I think it would be grand.

While I used to say exactly that for most of my life, trust me this is a gross oversimplification. With an emphasis on gross. Law traditions date back to the Romans, Celts, Germanics and others at least. And of course no sovereign country on the onset of the EU would have accepted the new EU norms if they were to contradict with their own. That the EU nowadays tries to impose rules that contradict those norms is reason for the ever rising resentment of Brussels around Europe.

> If we could avoid having to invade Ireland

You say it yourself: How can we declare moral superiority if we are openly discussing invading Ireland because we've abandoned pillar principles like national sovereignty?

How can you lament "over hundreds (or even thousand) of years in Europe [of] warfare" while simultaneously abandon the core lesson of those wars (sovereignty)?

Also, why is it wrong to tax the income of corporations?

It's like thinking the company should pay 5m in tax in Ireland based on sells in France while being ok with them deducting expenses from unrelated business in Ireland which you shouldn't care at all. If they paid that rate you should be happy even not even one dollar more made it to your country.

The whole idea doesn't make any sense at all. You want companies to pay more in your country? Tax exactly that - consumption of their goods in your country. It's not your business to decide how other countries choose to organize their tax code. Seriously fuck you for trying to force them. Ideas like that make EU much less popular idea that it was in the past.

VAT is tax for consumers, not corporations.

> Why do you feel entitled to profits of the company that isn't based in your country?

Because those profits are made from sales in that country, and every physical company selling in that country pays their taxes, just because Internet-based companies can avoid having a physical presence to perform their sales (Amazon still has warehouses), doesn't make them exempt from the same logic.

at the end of the day does it really matter? It's totally a tax on the corporations ability to do business. If we taxed the companies causing them to increase prices by 10%, the consumer still ends up having to pay 10% more on the products. Or if we taxed the companies at the point of sale for 10%, it's the same outcome for consumers.

Sorry, but where does this misconception come from that companies don't pay VAT? It's not true, I see it on my company's tax statement every month ;-)

VAT is indeed not paid by corporations.

It doesn't matter. It gets added to the price. All the money paid in taxes comes from consumers - be it VAT, sales tax, tax on profit, tarrifs - you name it. It doesn't matter which side you tax, it matters what kind of activity taxing is focused on.

>>Because those profits are made from sales in that country

Sales in that country is one element. Another is being efficient and well organized which another country allows. If you want to tax sells in your country - do it, I think it's great idea.

>>just because Internet-based companies can avoid having a physical presence to perform their sales (Amazon still has warehouses), doesn't make them exempt from the same logic.

Physical goods companies can avoid presence as well. A lot of them ship products to other countries but don't have offices there. They pay VAT.

It's easy to see why taxing profits is a very bad idea by considering situations where that tax differs from consumption tax. Here are few showing ridiculousness of taxing corporate profits:

1)Company A makes and sells tires, Company B makes and sells electronic chips. Company C does both. They don't differ much in efficiency or quality and C does the same volume as A and B in their respective industries. Now let's say 2020 is a bad year for tires due to increasing prices of materials and a very good year for chips due to AI advancement (everyone wants new AI equipped vacuum cleaner or w/e). Company A losses money, company B makes money. Company C makes as much money as company B on chips but losses same as company A on tires. Company C pays less tax than A and B combined. I hope it's obvious why this is bad. This alone makes tax on profits ridiculous idea. We just need something different.

2)Company A and B do the same thing. The difference is that management of company A likes buying high level employees exotic super cars and expensive trips. In 2020 companies A and B have the same product, same sells. The difference is that company's B employees drive 5 years old Volskwagens to clients and organize most of its meetings online while company's B employees drive and service super cars and go to Maldives 2 times a year. Company B pays more taxes.

3)In a small country there are only 2 companies and all the taxes come from them and their employees. They do the same thing - produce cars because that's what the citizens are good at. company A breaks even, company B has better management and produce same cars but more efficiently thus showing profits. Company A is happy with functioning as it is. Only company B pays taxes and funds schools, roads, hospitals. Socialists come to power and they want increase corporate taxes (as they are economically ignorant). Now Company B pays even higher taxes while Company's A tax burden doesn't change. Company's B employees lose motivation to work smarter because they see new taxes just tax their ingenuity and there is little incentive to make processes efficient. Maybe it's better to buy super cars and expensive exotic trips.

4)Two companies A and B in country X do software business. A buys licenses for components from a company in Switzerland (high labor costs thus higher prices), B develops them domestically for 50% of cost. Both companies have 10M in sells. B pays 9M for software, A pays 4.5M for development. Corporate tax rate is 20%. Citizens of the country V get 5.5M * 0.2 = 1.1M for roads and schools from company B and only 0.2M from company A, the difference goes to Swiss people. Even if tax rate in Switzerland is 30% it doesn't make any sense for country X to adopt this policy. No amount of forcing Switzerland to extract "fair share" is going to change that, their rate is already higher (of course Switzerland doesn't have 30% rate as that would be idiotic, I am just making a hypothetical).

There are more of this. It's easy to see. Focusing on taxing corporate profits is a sign of being short-sighted and petty thinking. It's not what you want even if equality is your major goal. Taxing profits defends lazy incumbents and makes things we don't want tax advantaged strategy this includes combining various activities under one umbrella, buying pointless shit because of tax deductions and temporary price gauging to kill upcoming companies.

It's not a cost when transacting with other companies but it's obviously a cost when selling to end customers. If people are willing to buy a car for 20 000 Euro you will be forced to sell for 16 666 Euro + 20% VAT, you can't magically sell for 20 000 + 20% VAT because "consumers pay VAT". If materials + labor cost of a car is 10 000 Euro you make 6 666 Euro per car if there is 20% VAT and 10 000 Euro per car if there is no VAT.

- buy something nationally (you pay VAT to the company) - export it to another EU company (reverse charge, so no VAT received or paid) - get the VAT refunded from your local tax agency.

Even nationally, you get VAT refunded if you've paid more to others than you've collected. At least for NL, but I'm pretty sure these rules should be the same in all EU countries.

There are exceptions (e.g. in Italy you only get refunded for 50% of the VAT you pay when buying phones, or 40% the VAT you pay when buying cars), but they are pretty much that, exceptions.

If operating domestically you will usually get more VAT money from customers than you will give to suppliers, so you will pay the difference to the state. If for any reason you pay more to suppliers than you get from customers, the difference becomes a tax credit that you can carry to the following accounting period or deduce from some other tax.

In Poland it is even possible to get that difference in cash - Tax office wire transfers it to your bank account. This gave birth to a countless scams, where the shell companies forge invoices, ask for VAT tax refund and then disappear with the money.

> Even nationally, you get VAT refunded if you've paid more to others than you've collected.

You do realize that this implies you're operating at a loss? Thus my statement about companies usually being run to make profits.

It's just lexical. Would you say 'oh the company is just routing its income tax to the taxman' if companies had to put their income tax percantages on invoices too?

The client however pays you 10 bucks in gross regardless whether the VAT you have to pay afterwards is 7, 15 or 25%

It doesn't matter who puts the money in an envelope and goes to the tax office; it matters who is subject to the tax.

Non-EU turists traveling in Europe will pay VAT on souvenirs that they're bringing back to their countries, and upon exiting from EU they will actually will get the VAT back, since they paid for it, but they were not supposed to since the goods are in the end going to be used outside EU.

This would just not make sense if VAT was paid by the seller.

No tax is paid by the customer. He always pays gross.

For example: you run a barber shop, mens haircut 10 €, womens 10€. You charge mens from your VAT-exempt company, women from your non-VAT-exempt company. Regardless of what you get in net, the customers hand you 10€ each. However the government takes 2€ from your womens hair cutting business, after you've filed your tax statement. The customer doesn't care whether you have to pay VAT or not.

If I may ask: Do you run a business where you have to deal with filing VAT on a regular basis? I'm asking because this misconception that businesses don't have to pay VAT is something that I've held myself, obviously because I didn't knew back then what I was talking about.

I very much do, I file quarterly and deal both domestically, intra-EU with reverse charge and extra-EU which is VAT exempt.

You're conflating the fact that you're filing VAT reports and forwarding VAT money to the state with the fact that you're paying VAT. These are two different things.

Again, do you pay employees? Do you retain some money from their wages and forward that to the state as a down payment on their income taxes[0]? Would you say that personal income tax is a tax on companies?

[0] I think this is usual in Europe; it surely is how it works in Italy

> "it’s absolutely not the same. If the VAT goes up 10%, your benefits after taxes won’t change one bit. VAT is indeed not paid by corporations."

but if you insist that somehow the customer is paying VAT to the government, then fine with me. I'm not here to be other people's tax-attorney.

>What remains after the corporate income tax usually winds up taxed just as your income is

In the US at least, capital gains are taxed at a different, and lower, rate than individual income.

Secondly, how do the rest of your points not apply to individuals as well. Yes the company makes money and it's taxed, and then it's paid out to shareholders and they are taxed. When I buy food at the grocery it's not some special type of dollar that can't be taxed because I'm not a corporation.

Everyone I pay out money to gets taxed as well, including banks who I pay out for loans I was given, the same way investors are taxed on a corporations income.

The only difference is that companies get to pay less because they get to write off all their expenses, while individuals have a much smaller subset of items they can expense

I get in the USA:

1. Mortgage interest deduction (controversial)

2. Property tax deduction (now limited with trump)

3. Transit & parking deduction

4. Retirement account 'deduction'

5. Medical plan deductions (controversial vs single payer)

6. Tax free company snacks, cafeteria food, t-shirts / swag and morale events. I think on site electric car charging is tax free too?

7. Reduced sales tax rates on essentials such as food, clothing depending on the state.

Taxing on revenue means a corporation that actually loose money because its expenses (salaries, investmenst, etc) are larger than its sales would still have to pay taxes, making it loose even more money. It doesn't make any kind of sense unless you're targeting a very particular set of companies that you know are making money. In which case you're taxing those companies, but you're also creating a law that makes it almost impossible for new companies to start competing.

It is also almost impossible for new companies to start competing if existing big players can easily avoid paying taxes while you cannot. And no, we cannot simply allow everyone to not pay taxes.

Also, some companies like industries have huge revenues but make few profits because of the enormous cost to produce what they sell.

Try thinking about the various cases and you’ll soon realize there’s actually a very good reason why corporates taxes have always been on profits, since the very beginning.

But undoubtedly a start-up during that phase also benefits from public education and roads, from state-subsidized internet and transport, from security provided by the police force etc and hence should also pay its fair share towards those costs?

The problem (beside the fact that corporate tax on revenues is just one tax corporations are paying among others) is :

1/ every single developed country has roads and hospitals and schools. Look at how much they ask for tax and the service they offer (and no, don't believe what people in france tell you. We don't have the best hospitals by far, and we don't have the best schools).

2/ at which point do you think we should stop adding taxes ? Is there a limit, or will you always be able to say "but then, what about the schools and the roads" ?

Maybe it would be a good thing if "grow fast...conquer market" were less of a goal for new companies than building one of a number of stable and sustainable businesses serving a market?

Perhaps we'd get markets where a variety of products and services compete on their features and merits, each having an appropriate place within the overall market, instead of an unhealthy winner-takes-all situation where the startup that gets the most money thrown at it can spend its way to world domination.

Folks that work low-wage or volunteer jobs would suddenly have negative income. The only viable jobs left would be bankers and software developers.

Corporations, for some reason, only get taxed on revenue - expenses.

[1] Whoop-dee-doo, I can claim a $3,800/year deduction. As if anyone in the United States can live on $3,800/year.

I'd love to only be taxed on 'profit' - the money that goes into my savings account, after deducting living and transportation expenses. [1]

[1] Actually, if everyone were taxed on profit, my tax burden would proportionately go up. It would be a fairer system of taxation, though.

I can’t believe there aren’t ways to detect when a subsidiary buys services from HQ at abnormal prices.

So while it is a problem, its not a new one - nor an unsolvable one.

They just have no clue about what to do so they try to tax it.

Well, guess what, people who actually want to achieve something productive, who want to make a good living, who want to start a company and not see our profits taxed again and again to feed a bunch of bureaucrats who have never even run a business before, those people they have already left and they are not coming back.

Ireland has been busted (among others) for secretly passing sweet taxation deals with Google, Facebook, Amazon & co. According to you, that's the way to do it, right ? Tax race to the bottom, give deals to big player that no small company has hope to ever negociate, that's sure to bolster competitors. Any kind of attemp to level the playing field by applying tax uniformly on the European level is "sick".

That is 100% uninformed nonsense.

If you are conflating it with Apple vs EU, you can read this primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_State_aid_case_agai...

Nothing to do with a country offering a multinational a deal which results in a lower effective tax rate, and is something _EVERY_ country in Europe offers.

Also this is not just about 'taxation policies'. They are pretty free in their policies, except that they can't make exceptions for particular companies because such special deals give a company a competitive advantage, distorting the market.

This is not true. Only those with a EU country citizenship are fully covered by the free movement rules. You can read more about it here: https://ec.europa.eu/immigration/general-information/already... but I will give you a quote: "To move from one EU country to another for more than 90 days, you will need a long-stay visa or a residence permit for that country. If you wish to work, study or join your family in the second country, you may have to fulfil more conditions."

An exception to this are so called Blue card holders, but only those with certain education/ professional experience plus job offer with a salary above a certain level are eligible for such a card.

> but over here we tend prefer for the government not to swing its weight around until there is clear evidence of a problem.

There is clear evidence of a problem: SF banned scooters to give itself time to figure out how to regulate them: http://www.sfexaminer.com/companies-pull-scooters-off-sf-str.... There is no reason to think SF is particularly unique and that other municipalities won't have similar experience.

And even before SF banned scooters, there was clear evidence of problems with dockless rentals in China: sidewalks became bike parking lots with little room left for actual walking.

This idea that governments should only regulate if there's a manifested problem in their particular jurisdiction is pretty stupid, frankly. It's like saying you shouldn't make up your mind about crack cocaine before you've actually tried it and experience the problems it causes.

The prevailing issue being, politicians - under the false pretense that they paid to be "leaders" (read: look at me! look at what I can do!!) instead of problem solvers - grab their hammer and do what they already do...pound away.

How's that working out for us?

Note: I'm not suggesting a solution per se. Simply acknowledging that we have a problem, and the general nature of that problem.

There is not as much disagreement as it can sometimes seem, between those particular groups, as ID'ed using that jargon.

The American Conservatives and the American Liberals both think that laws should be the knee-jerk reaction to certain sets of problems. Their differences lie in which problems those are: by and large, the Conservatives say that those are the social problems, and the Liberals say that those are the economic problems.

But you are right, there are many who think they should be a last-resort measure in all-but-every case: the American jargon calls them Libertarians, and the American first-past-the-post voting system calls them personae non gratae.

Google cannot get rid of the EU market, if it does, EU competitors might have a chance. So the EU can just tax Google as much as it wants. What are we to be afraid of ? Google leaving EU ? Please do ! This will only gives us a chance to come we our own solution to the web Google&FB think they invented.

I don't get how we could not be glad that we tax more those dystopian companies. Google, FB, etc... don't respect any values of privacy and freedom, they should not have even the right to do what they do in EU and GDPR is step in the right direction for that.

The only problem is that we have no weight if we don't act together, so if some European countries are too short-sighted and put their self little short term interest above the rest and prefer offer encourage Google's development, then yes we will fail.

The only thing they’ve managed to do is to increase the cost of the public sector. So yes, indeed i don’t have any kind of trust in their ability to understand pretty much anything.

That’s the « they ». Everybody in the fifth republic believes that the state should regulate the economy, while having absolutely no personnal experience in the private sector. The only differences they have are on society issues, but from the economical point of view i have yet to witness one government that actually lowered the tax ratio ( just look at the CSG which was supposed to be temporary and 3% 25 years ago, and is now still alive and reaches more than 10%)

As for the efficiency of the public sector and the tax system look at france’s tax vs gdp ratio compared to other european country, as well as our ranking in education performance ( both young children school and university). Also have a look at unemployment rates, compared to other european countries.

Edit : to be fair, macron did come from the private sector ( just a few years though), and he did in fact remove a huge chunk of the ISF last year. That was a glimmer of hope. Also another reason why seeing France go back to its old habits makes me mad.

2 - I know a capitalist system that notoriously fails to redistribute wealth even though it's the richest economy in the world. Its ruling class seems to be keen on implementing those ultraliberal taxation ideas of yours. Sub-par healthcare and expensive education is the result. Then again, that is not a system that I think is worth emulating.

3 - As much as I appreciate politicians in general, I wouldn't be so immodest as to pretend that they're a bunch of stupid bureaucrats, meaning by that that I know how things work better than they do.

how fast things evolve...

The cost of the public sector has increased because of the large wave of privatizations, it's called the cost of capital.

I don't see any justification for your position besides a nebulous wish for Europe to have an equivalent of google/facebook, and to be honest, besides adding an extra line on all those "european unicorn" blog posts, i don't see much advantage to it either. There's obviously positives to more profitable businesses - but why another google/facebook?

Criteo is « just an ad business » ( which is going to take a huge hit from all the privacy measures, btw). It’s extremely vulnerable compared to the company that own the content platform, aka the search engine, or the social network. Calling them a competitor to google is true, but it’s also a very narrow point of view.

Just look at how well it’s doing on the stock exchange and you’ll see what i mean,

"Standing up to multinational corporations and making them pay their fair share (ra! ra!)" is exactly the type of rhetoric our most generic politicians love.

An American equivalent might be some "government out of your hair" initiative to reduce professional liscencing.. or somesuch.

Once you've got something like that on the table, all the cheapest politicians come out of the woodwork.

On a serious not though, I think it's a good idea if (and only if) this names and addresses the problem which this actually intends to fix: company tax.

Companies have always been difficult to tax properly for 2 reasons. (1) "profit" is whatever your accountant says it is, and this is a manipulatable figure. (2) companies operate in multiple tax jurisdictions. Between these two things, these companies don't pay tax. Besides denying the taxman her due, this gives bigger piles of money and advantage over smaller ones. Not fair. Sad.

I just don't see how modern democracies can address something like this. It's at the nexus of all the things we suck at (politically) at the moment. Cheap idealogy, corporate interest groups, and complicated systems.

Once you accept taxing corporate profit is a very bad idea the solutions magically appear: tax consumption and things we don't want (pollution, land usage etc.) It's very easy to make consumption tax progressive if you want that (higher rates for luxury goods, refunds up to X amount per month, funding social services with it etc.).

There is no reason to debate what a company based in country at the end of the world should pay or how your neighbors choose to tax their companies. If they do business in your country the revenue is collected by consumption tax. If your country is nice to live in people will move and pay tax there. The incentives are right for the politicians: make your country businesses friendly and a nice place to live and for the companies who move to places which are more business friendly and better to operate in as tax rate isn't an issue anymore - everyone sets their consumption tax rates and everyone who sells there must oblige.

The countries setting their corporate tax to near 0% have the right idea. I hope they won't be bullied of their position.

Many countries apparently nice to live in are doing their best to keep people out.

those purchases are taxed as income

Wouldn't the same argument hold for income tax then?

I mean, I can evade income tax to a certain extent by making my boss buy me a nice car, computer, bicycle etc.

But yeah same is true for income tax, my country has a really high wage income tax at top bracket (close to 50% with health&benefits) that kicks in really fast, but profit income tax caps at 20% because people would just take profits out of the country if it was higher. so a lot of people work around it by invoicing their salary as self owned company pay min wage and take the rest as profit.

The profit out of salary (for most people) is just not big enough to justify an accountant to optimize.

There is a lot to be said about replacing income tax with a pure consumption tax (it is one possible financial model for the universal basic income).

Most systems tax these at a higher rate. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_benefits_tax_(Australia...

It's not about fixing the Bahamas here.

I do agree with your first sentence though, whether this is good or bad depends on the particulars.

They have definitely been wooed to denmark, labour and consumer electricity prices are some of the highest in the world.

https://facebook.com/OdenseDataCenter/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-denmark/apple-to-bu...

https://stateofgreen.com/en/partners/state-of-green/news/goo...

They also don't buy anything locally, except electricity at negotiated prices close to or below the costs of production. Maybe they lead to some earnings/profits to be at their location? Considering the issue discussed here, I doubt that.

You just wrote the plot to The New IT Crowd..

Eh, I've always seen them more as Kryten than Marvin.

due to taxes which companies don't pay, so that doesn't matter.

Look at the following graph (you need to expand it). Denmark has the lowest prices. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263262/industrial-sector...

Price of electricity in Denmark is less than 51% of the price in Ireland!

Having said that, EU law is supposed to prevent governments from propping up local industry.

Can anyone expand on which knobs an EU country is allowed to fiddle in order to attract these types of projects? I believe tax breaks and direct subsidies are not allowed.

It's like they have a vested interest, or something.

It's not even that in this case, because it's not like there are serious European competitors to these companies (except maybe the odd Samwer clone here and there) that could even be protected. This is purely an attempt to rip these companies off, because the governments can.

I find it interesting that the companies are often portrayed as smart for doing this, but politicians are jealous and incompetent. Almost like we worship businesses and malign government. I wonder whose interests that viewpoint supports.

Megacorps have been systematically screwing people for several hundred years. By comparison, most of the book of Exodus is a story about government systematically screwing people. People seem to prefer the devil they don't know right now. The arc of progress is long.

One could argue that the statist systems in Scandinavia work quite okay... don't you agree?

How about you share how you think this could work? While I agree for more competitiveness for my country, history has shown me repeatedly that low taxes isn't actually working out that great.

Equating low taxes with increased competitiveness is to me dishonest as a generality. I'm certainly not opposed to admitting that it can work in some cases, but I can't agree to this as a general rule.

For example:

Hungary 9%, Bulgaria 10%, Lithuania 15%, Romania 16%, Croatia 18%, Poland 19%, Czech 19%, Slovenia 19%, UK 19%, Estonia 20%, Finland 20%, Latvia 20%

Even Denmark is at 22% and Norway is at 23%, traditionally high tax countries.

Outside the EU in Europe you have Montenegro 9%, Macedonia 10%, Bosnia 10%, Serbia 15%, Georgia 15%, Albania 15%, Belarus 18%, Russia 20%, Armenia 20%.

Another decade of rate competition and the EU average might be down to something close to 18%.

The real unusual stand-outs these days are the high total rate nations, like France, Belgium, Greece and Germany, rather than the low rate nations.

Q: How many companies would site a corporate office in Luxembourg if there were no tax advantage?

The effective tax rate is far lower than this, but also, most countries have an effective tax rate for megacorps far lower than what they advertise once exemptions, subsidies and tax-breaks come into play.

That's not the case in other EU countries.

GP was indicating that Ireland has one of the lowest standard corporation taxes at 12.5% available to everyone, not that there aren't even better effective rates offered to larger corps & multinationals.

Are you referring to the non-trading income corporation tax rate, or is there something else going on? If something else, that sounds an awful lot like corruption

The EU allows for free cross boarder trade and movement of assets within the EU. Having a lower corporate tax rate in one country means businesses operating in the EU put their revenue through there. It's an automatic incentive.

There are rules here because otherwise it would be a race to the bottom. Each country wants Amazon, Google, etc for their employees' income tax.

The whole EU loses out from one state giving multinationals preferential treatment.

I'm not sure this is true any more, at least not everywhere

"Amazon has become the first technology company to abandon controversial corporate structures that divert sales and profits away from UK in the face of a clampdown imposed by George Osborne.

From the start of [May 2015] the online retailer has started booking its sales through the UK, meaning resulting profits will be taxed by HMRC [the UK tax authority]. The group made $8.3bn (£5.3bn) of worldwide sales from British online shoppers but for 11 years all these internet transactions have been booked in Luxembourg."

source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/23/amazon-to...

But there are still lower tax areas. This is still an issue that is not simple to unravel because flat tax was not a founding part of the EU, something we figured out after the fact.

Amazon, Ebay, and Google all put the vast majority of their earnings through secondary states within the EU, not the main markets. I'm not sure what Apple do these days, but they've just paid a couple of ~£200m in extra tax found from an audit. The others "claim" they are going to rectify this, but it's all face-saving. They're all lying tax cheats.

Their UK businesses are tiny. Warehousing and marketing.

Some people seem to assume that high corporate income tax rates are a good thing, but there's really no proof of that. We would all be better off if every country eliminated corporate income taxes entirely, and made the change revenue neutral by increasing taxes on high income investors and employees. This would encourage economic growth by eliminating resources wasted on tax accounting and avoidance.

Zero Corporation Tax allows multinationals to make huge profits and just chuck the money back home, even if that's outside the Union. Yeah, they're probably paying tax on it somewhere, but it's not taxed in the place it was earned. That's the problem here. Countries are losing cash and tax revenue to this.

Your trickle-down economics is similarly unproven.

Seeing so many people discussing this under wrong assumptions, even on HN, makes me sad and makes me think there's a very low ceiling on tax complexity, above which people lose track completely. This means we'll never be able to fix tax. Only tax lawyers will ever even begin to grasp it. It's also a pretty good argument against direct democracy as well as an argument for abolishing the corporate tax completely.

Besides, it's not like your alternative is any more appealing anyway. I'm not so sure about the absolutism of saying "oh, it's not perfect, so let's just abolish it completely to make sure countries get even less to subsidize healthcare and education".

Before implicitly calling other people braindead next time, maybe consider that none of us are 100% right and we are all just having a discussion.

> Nothing in the Treaty of Lisbon makes any change of any kind, for any Member State, to the extent or operation of the competence of the European Union in relation to taxation.

It's legally binding, and ensures that Ireland retained the right to set our its corporation tax rate.

All the other EU nations at the time (some have joined since) unanimously ratified the Irish Guarantees, so if anything, it's rich of them to now complain about an agreement that they willingly and knowingly signed up to.

For examples of the same mechanism: Amazon's HQ2 farce aptly shows what happens when jurisdictions cannot effectively coordinate and are forced undercut each other. Is there any doubt that Amazon would settle in some city and hire people and pay taxes without their little version of Hunger Games? So the net effect is simply some city being marginally better of but forgoing the jackpot that would usually come with being chosen, and therefore those citizens having to pay instead. Plus the harm that comes from Amazon making decisions based on money alone, to the detriment of other factors such as quality-of-life for its employees.

That's why any trade deal includes provisions prohibiting subsidies not covered by a few narrow exemptions: they distort the competition and simply lead to losses in a zero-sum game between nations and private corporations.

Every person has their breaking point where mere pragmatism no longer holds sway. Peace, but at what cost?

What's really good is that this creates a system where it's not only nonexistent, but it's also not even possible at all. It's like what Typescript/a linter does to Javascript: the EU greatly discourages entire classes of problems threatening the life/well-being of its citizens.

The leverage against foreign countries is a real pragmatic thing, though, not some ideology. Why else do you think Trump celebrated Brexit, and actively tries to break up different unions that we've spent years building, like NATO? I'm not saying that he's the devil, even though I'm not a big fan, but I understand that he's doing it to have his way with less opposition. Divide and conquer?

+ "permission to screw over the other countries they're in economic union with by acting as a tax haven for transactions that occur in those other countries"

“It just remains for me to offer Paschal a beer in a Dublin pub, and then I think we’ll be able to move toward a decision,” he said, referring to his Irish counterpart, Paschal Donohoe

I'd be interested to here their objects if anyone can point at a fuller article or discussion of the issues.

>“A digital services tax deviates from fundamental principles of income taxation by applying the tax on gross income, i.e. without regard to whether the taxpayer is making a profit or not,” Swedish Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson, and her counterparts from Denmark and Finland, Kristian Jensen and Petteri Orpo, said in a joint statement on Friday.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-digital-tax/nordic-cou...

It's either disguised as loan interest repayment or licensing fees, but the goal is tax avoidance.

What effect would a tax purely on size (income rather than profit) have on the world economy, if everyone were to adopt such policies? It would discourage large companies and encourage small ones.

It seems like employees do better when there is a bigger and more diverse marketplace for work, ie, many smaller companies. So they would win out, hopefully.

Customers may or may not do better. It would encourage companies to keep prices low to reduce gross income, and give an advantage to incumbents in the same marketplace. But one Amazon with it's fulfillment centers, delivery networks, etc, is more efficient than two overlapping half-sized Amazons. Twice the delivery trucks means twice the delivery costs and pollution.

Overall I'd be for such a system, provided it were not too onerous and didn't target specific companies.

Google and Apple would be fine. Amazon would be toast. Your local supermarket would be toast (avg grocery store margins are 1%). Any startups that are just scraping by, no matter how small, would be toast.

You would basically crank up the difficulty level of business across the board. This would generally help successful incumbents by making life punishingly difficult for challengers, who have to climb up through a period of unprofitability.

It is a terrible idea.

How so? Your argument makes 0 sense because the tax is proportional regardless of size. What it will encourage is high margin business and it will discourage low margin business. Larger businesses are able to increase their margins because of increased efficiencies.

What I'm saying is that if there were a small additional tax on giants based purely on their company value or gross sales, it would 'level the playing field' for incumbents who don't have the efficiencies of scale that the big companies have, which I think is beneficial to society.

I would be concerned if low profit margins is a problem.. companies with a low profit margin is the reason we can afford so much stuff.

There are so many ways a company can legally and artificially lower its profit numbers.

Because it is generally in everyone's best interest for companies to invest in themselves rather than increase margin at all costs. Growth is good. Many companies would simply go under if you tax them on revenue.

>There are so many ways a company can legally and artificially lower its profit numbers

Then you try to cut those off as much as possible. Like most things in the real world, there's no perfect solution, but we weigh the pros and cons and make a decision.

Given our current economic situation and our effect on our environment I'm not convinced that it is that simple.

What accounting standard means that business is making a profit in the EU?

For the year, you spend $1,000,000 paying for fuel, convenience store supplies, electricity, wages, etc. You get $1,050,000 in revenue from your customers, for a fairly realistic margin of 5%.

Now let's say you run a software business. You pay $500,000 in electric bills, computers, wages, etc, and collect $1,000,000 in revenue for a margin of 50%.

Would you rather live in a society where the gas station pays MORE tax than the software business? This would be the case if you taxed revenue instead of profit. If the revenue-tax rate were 4%, the owner of the gas station would be left with $10,000 at the end of the year, and the owner of the software business would be left with $460,000. Bringing these numbers back into normal, profit-based terms, the gas station owner would be paying an effective tax rate of 80%, with the software business owner paying an effective tax rate of 8%.

If businesses were taxed on revenue instead of profit, low margin businesses and capital intensive businesses would be punished disproportionately. Businesses often face unplanned expenses or loss of revenue. This would have the effect of forcing businesses to raise prices to compensate for the increased risk, and would force lots out of business. This reduced economic activity would be bad for consumers, producers, the government, and society as a whole.

Individual people's income taxes cannot be treated this way, because the closest analogy to "business expenses" for a person's lifestyle is their cost of living. If cost of living were deductible it would be highly gameable and ripe for abuse by numerous parties.

You are being a little bit funny here. This paragraph basically proves the OP's point.

Because companies would never abuse the taxation rules, of course. They would never cheat by shifting money around in opaque ways so as to lower the profits they have to report for taxation purposes. Clearly, that's why they can be trusted to be taxed on profits rather than revenue, but mere mortals cannot.

/sarcasm

I think in your gas station example, the net effect of a 4% tax on revenue would naturally be a 4% increase in the sales price of goods. Or, the gas station would go out of business...

I actually don't think a flat revenue tax would necessarily overall be better than the current system where taxes are based solely on profits, precisely because of examples like the one you give. It seems like some sort of combined model of a revenue tax and profit tax may be the way to go. Which is incidentally where the EU was going with this particular proposal.

The degree to which businesses generate expenses is the majority of the degree to which they take on risk. It's pretty well understood that most economies are already too risk-averse. We should not further punish those willing to take risk.

The thrust of my argument is focused around the fact that low margin businesses would have an EXTREMELY high sensitivity to variable cash flows. I should have focused more on how unfair this is to small businesses, which already are a risky proposition. It is strange to me that multiple people have replied without having any acknowledgement of this.

The benefits of taxation must be balanced against the potential for abuse and the damage it does to the businesses that are taxed.

Taxing revenue would likely have less potential for abuse, but I would argue the damage it would do to the economy would be much larger than the benefit this may provide.

I do get tax credits for some essentials but it's relatively speaking a miniscule amount.

There's an interesting formula for a progressive tax regime if anybody wants to take it up ...

Taxing only your disposable income would mean that a person living in a mansion would pay much less than someone living in a small home, which is weird; arguably, the extra niceness of the house is "profit", whereas the shareholders don't usually benefit from paying more for their inputs (some exceptions notwithstanding).

Just as weird as a corporation with billions in revenue paying a zero or negative tax rate? Or weirder?

Oh! What's the name of this country?

In my country all taxes are applied before you get to see the actual money.

That is the thing. Maybe a person could do that if the rules let them, but businesses are already doing it, at scale. I think that either businesses should not be able to do it, or normal people should be able to do it. As for the "low margin business" example, I see no reason for the government to support any particular kind of business over another under a capitalist system.

As an individual taxpayer you can deduct certain expenses from your revenue when calculating your taxable income, just like a business. But businesses do generally have a broader set of deductible expenses.

You as a person don't have a clear "profit" to tax. I would argue that the system of deductions is the nearest equivalent to taxing your individual income on your profits.

with our lives now largely tracked electronically, that’s becoming less true (but is still at least an undue burden for the ~40% of the population who are poor or near poor).

I don't think that is actually the closest you could get, even ignoring that you're asserting two wildly different things should necessary be equivalent. But even so: Do you literally never take any deductions at all? Never expense anything? No mortgage or whatever? Have zero capital gains income of any kind an in turn never have any losses of any kind there? You just add up all income sources and simply pay the top rate off the sticker price and ignore all the rest? I mean, it's not impossible or illegal to do such a thing and pay more if you want to, but I think you'd be somewhat in the minority there. Even personal income taxes at least haltingly, imperfectly and politically try to take somewhat into account that there are certain expenses necessary for humans to live or that further societal goals and that if after paying those someone has little left over then the tax system should take that into account.

>why should I as a person be taxed...[differently from business]

Humans and businesses aren't the same thing, businesses (like government) are a tool composed of and serving humans. It is a structure for dealing with and directing flows of capital towards human decided ends, and all money that goes through it ultimately ends up in the hands of humans as income upon which it is taxed there too anyway. A "business" has direct societal costs in terms of corporate law and such, but it does not need to ever use an ambulance or get housing or food support or whatever. Taxes on business, separate from the humans that compose said business, should be for dealing with business specific requirements, cost internalization, and so on. It makes absolutely no sense to simply tax a business the same as a human, not even if you are simultaneously proposing not taxing any of the humans involved. If it's done be prepared for perverse consequences. If a business has high revenue with genuinely 3% margins that still represents a huge amount of money flowing from and too various humans (including all the employees, all suppliers and contractors, their employees, and on), "revenue" is still taxed somewhere. But if you then simply slap a tax on the revenue again and make the margin go negative now the business dies, simple as that, and all the flows cease. Is that actually your intention? Why not just seize it then and take it all for the government directly?

If you want to argue that the income flows going to humans are themselves ultimately not taxed fairly, that is not merely doable but I think fairly widely agreed at this point. And if you want to argue that specifically and properly assessed business income taxes should not be possible to evade as so many do sure, that too happily seems to be inching forward. But you seem to be going a lot more radical and just throwing out everything.

Well, welcome to a part of the world were software development doesn't necessarily mean big money. I don't own a house (I share a room with my SO in an apartment with other two people and a dog), and I don't have anything invested because I don't have money to invest, so no capital gains of any kind. The only expenses I could deduct are for prescriptions and my glasses, which I don't do because the burden is too high for the kind of money I would get (think <100€ per year) and I don't buy drugs often anyway.

> if you then simply slap a tax on the revenue again and make the margin go negative now the business dies, simple as that, and all the flows cease. Is that actually your intention?

No, I was just asking why am I not taxed based on what I earn minus rent, food and transportation.

> Why not just seize it then and take it all for the government directly?

Why not, indeed? I mean, I get that a lot of people in here are libertarian, but that doesn't mean it's the only way. I'm not actually advocating for State ownership, I'm just saying it's not necessarily impossible to have such a system.

> Spearheaded by France, the plan has met resistance from countries such as Ireland and Sweden, which question the wisdom of the EU going it alone given the global nature of digital services.

First, not all services are digital, especially not Amazon packages.

Second, the "global nature" is a technological aspect. The corporations themselves are local to some jurisdiction, as are their clients.

This argument is similar to computing in the "Cloud": Technologically, the service is perhaps global, but the physical manifestation of it certainly isn't. That data center is located somewhere, and when it goes down, one is reminded of the limitations of the "global" aspect.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-05/eu-s-divi...

My latest invoice from AMZN says "Sold by Amazon EU S.à r.l., UK Branch". Amazon EU S.à.r.l. is based in Luxembourg.

My order was one (single) LTO cleaning cartridge. Does anyone here think that cartridge even went anywhere near Luxembourg at any point between manufacture and reaching me?

I doubt it.