4 ms·

"The excuse that 'everyone does it' is a bad one. It doesn't work out for all the criminals in jail in US for dealing drugs, now does it?" Governments give inc

"The excuse that 'everyone does it' is a bad one. It doesn't work out for all the criminals in jail in US for dealing drugs, now does it?" Governments give incentives including subsidies and tax breaks all the time to companies. Nearly every film made in Canada in the EU gets tax breaks. Are you suggesting 'film makers' are like 'drug dealers'? Can the EU rule that tax credits for film-makers are now 'illegal' after so many years? How about subsidies to Airbus? And defence contractors? That this has been going on for 25 years and the EU didn't say anything about it completely absurd and shows how broken the system is. If you're going to have a 'single market' then you must have tax harmonization, or you have these issues - ergo - the fault is again the EU. Re-interpreting laws 25 years retroactively is firmly in the camp of 'theft of private property' by government, totally banana republic. The EU needs to fix it's game and stop blaming other entities for it's shortcomings.

Fnoord 10y ago
>> "The excuse that 'everyone does it' is a bad one. It doesn't work out for all the criminals in jail in US for dealing drugs, now does it?" > Governments give incentives including subsidies and tax breaks all the time to companies. How on earth is that a reply to what you are quoting? Learn to quote. Your original statement was a deceiving lie, and I corrected it. The EU did, in fact, not retroactively change a law since that is impossible. At interpretation of a law however, can be changed. The EU has told Ireland that their deal was invalid, and asked the Irish government to still ask Apple for all the money they owe the EU. It is money we -as civilians of the EU government- never received from Apple. As I said in my previous post (you did not address any of what I wrote except went on a completely different tangent): If you play dirty around the rules don't complain when it does not work out. If Apple had simply played according to the rules none of this would've happened. My example of how terrible the US government is was actually one where the US government profits because the US government profits from drugs felons via free labour. I'm not going to get into this holier than thou debate on subsidies since I find it a complex topic to judge on by a case by case scenario. Other than that I'm casually gonna mention the US does this as well (in multiple kinds of ways including for example corn), as well as waging all kind of illegal wars and installing democracies as well as dictatorships to wage illegal wars, as well as economic espionage on their allies (Belgacom hacks come to mind). All of which the EU barely does, if it even does that. Some specific EU countries do, and I'm not happy about that. One of the worst culprits on that, for better or worse, is soon leaving us and in that delight I won't shed a tear.

Fnoord 10y ago

>> "The excuse that 'everyone does it' is a bad one. It doesn't work out for all the criminals in jail in US for dealing drugs, now does it?" > Governments give incentives including subsidies and tax breaks all the time to companies. How on earth is that a reply to what you are quoting? Learn to quote. Your original statement was a deceiving lie, and I corrected it. The EU did, in fact, not retroactively change a law since that is impossible. At interpretation of a law however, can be changed. The EU has told Ireland that their deal was invalid, and asked the Irish government to still ask Apple for all the money they owe the EU. It is money we -as civilians of the EU government- never received from Apple. As I said in my previous post (you did not address any of what I wrote except went on a completely different tangent): If you play dirty around the rules don't complain when it does not work out. If Apple had simply played according to the rules none of this would've happened. My example of how terrible the US government is was actually one where the US government profits because the US government profits from drugs felons via free labour. I'm not going to get into this holier than thou debate on subsidies since I find it a complex topic to judge on by a case by case scenario. Other than that I'm casually gonna mention the US does this as well (in multiple kinds of ways including for example corn), as well as waging all kind of illegal wars and installing democracies as well as dictatorships to wage illegal wars, as well as economic espionage on their allies (Belgacom hacks come to mind). All of which the EU barely does, if it even does that. Some specific EU countries do, and I'm not happy about that. One of the worst culprits on that, for better or worse, is soon leaving us and in that delight I won't shed a tear.