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Company pay taxes because societies a.k.a. countries say so. Taxes are not a business dealing in kind of you give this, they give you that. Countries do not nee

• dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >Countries do not need a rationale for taxes as long as they stay consistent in their law Legally speaking, sure. Morally speaking, it's not so clear. Wars have been started because the rulers subscribed too heavily to your line of reasoning. Being taxed into oblivion is generally considered a damn good reason to kick out the current government, peacefully at first but violently if necessary. While I don't think Britain and France are anywhere near a breaking point with respect to taxes it's worth remembering that a breaking point exists.
  • kgwgk 7y ago
    Taxing Google and Facebook is not pushing British or French population closer to that breaking point.
    • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Costs get passed on to buyers and eventually to consumers. They might get diluted along the way but they do get passed on.
      • nolok 7y ago
        ... Except you then realize that in Google and Facebook's case the end user you think of is not the customer/consumer those costs will be passed on. EDIT: downvoting me doesn't change the fact that those 2 don't make their money by charging you and me their users, they charge advertisers who want to show us ads and get our data. If a cost needs to be passed on, it will be passed on them.
        • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
          Those advertisers will pass the cost onto their customers. This is consumer facing advertising we're talking about. The people the advertisers pass their cost on to are the consumers, the people buying their products and services.
          • evgen 7y ago
            Sorry, but reality does not work that way. The economy is not really some collection of autonomous agents trading spherical cows like macro-economists would like you to think. When you get two or three layers removed from a cost/benefit at this scale it has been reduced to noise. What will happen is that the ad vendors (Google, FB, etc) will pass some of the cost on to ad buyers but not all and the tech titan stockholders will take a small hit. The ad buyers will integrate the new costs into their ad models and so they will view it as a cost of advertising and pay it (small profit hit) or will consider alternative advertising options if the cost impacts advertising ROI. What will the consumers pay? Nothing.
            • afjl 7y ago
              This comment seems a bit speculative, do you have or is there information out there that supports this? This is more anecdotal, but my time at a logistics company has shown the opposite to be true. Every cost increase, whether it was a tariff or increased fuel surcharge, was passed on to the next company, and to the next, down to the end consumer themselves. Every increase in vendor/supplier price was reflected almost immediately in the next invoice as our CFO instructed us to maintain our profit margins. There was even a multiplicative effect as each company applied their margins onto each price increase, such that a $100 increase in fuel costs could be double or triple that by the end. It is possible that companies with massive margins might be willing to bite the bullet, but I doubt the advertising industry is full of companies with big margins. Perhaps the tech companies at the top, but definitely not the more numerous and smaller companies. For this reason, I find it extremely unlikely that "the end user will pay nothing". The end user will pay something, but the size of that "something" is certainly debatable.
    • Youcandothis 7y ago
      No, but not only a displeased population can cause trouble to a state.