8 ms·

Irish media spinning this as a win for the irish people, while there are ongoing talks of increasing income tax on normal people to help cover the cost of this

• stormdennis 6y ago
  No tax was owed to the Irish people from Apple. It was European commisson overreach. [Edit: been this comment is oscillating between -1 and 1 like a yoyo.]
  • matthewheath 6y ago
    It was hardly overreach by the Commission. They are entitled to ensure companies pay their fair share of tax, and that Member States don't undercut each other.
  • karavelov 6y ago
    It is owned to EU people as the extracted profits from EU were transferred to Ireland and not taxed due to loop hole in Irish law
    • alphadevx 6y ago
      Well apparently not, according to the ruling being overturned today by the EU court. They are the legal facts.
• robertlagrant 6y ago
  Apple is ultimately normal people as well, either buying from them or working for them.
  • lemontruth 6y ago
    do you mean more equal? tell me which normal company (people) pay sub-1% tax?
    • adventured 6y ago
      > tell me which normal company (people) pay sub-1% tax? Which company are you talking about? Apple's tax rate in 2019 was 16%. They paid $10.5 billion in corporate income taxes. The problem is the bureaucracy of the EU can't manage to fix their tax laws. With 27 members of the EU, and a broad spectrum of economic condition among them, there will always be nations that will benefit from very low tax rates. There is no scenario where the EU will ever fix their tax problems. Ireland is set to become one of the wealthiest nations in world history because of their corporate income tax rate, their GDP per capita is almost 100% higher than Britain and France now and that gap will keep expanding over time. Ireland is going to give that up? Not a chance. Hungary is at 9%. What's the EU plan for dealing with that? Threaten them? Sanction them?
      • zwirbl 6y ago
        Ireland is more likely to increase taxes for the general population than for corporations
      • stormdennis 6y ago
        A lot of Ireland's GDP is illusory, it's just money passing through Dublin on its way somewhere else.
  • qayxc 6y ago
    Apple is a company and has billions of cash reserves. I also don't consider CEOs with hundreds of millions annually income to be "normal people" either. I'm not saying this is wrong, I'm just objecting to the notion of this being "normal".
  • ubercow13 6y ago
    What is the wealth distribution of people affected by an increase in corporate taxes on Apple compared to an increase in general taxation in Ireland?
  • rusk 6y ago
    Really? Can I write off depreciation of my assets (car, house etc) against tax?
    • alphadevx 6y ago
      Sure! You just need to form a company, then declare your assets as belonging to your company, and not yours.
      • rusk 6y ago
        Pretty sure the tax man will call that “benefit in kind”
        • alphadevx 6y ago
          LOL I am sure you are right, I was joking of course :-)
          • rusk 6y ago
            Wasn’t funny
• raxxorrax 6y ago
  Exactly. This is not Apples fault though, since they are not responsible for tax laws. The EU could have been a vehicle to solve that problem together, but since then I lost my believe it could enact change. Ireland has probably interest in large cooperation staying in Dublin and it might really be in the interest of Irish citizens too... Still, the current situation is just a grave case of injustice.
  • mattmanser 6y ago
    Would you say that someone who finds a way to murder someone within the law isn't at fault in that murder? You're simply playing a game of semantics, they're still culpable of tax evasion, just not legally culpable. Just because Apple have found a way to avoid tax, doesn't mean it's not their fault. You might find some idiots who argue there's a shareholder requirement, but that's not the law either.
    • logicchains 6y ago
      >Would you say that someone who finds a way to murder someone within the law isn't at fault in that murder? This is a pretty ridiculous comparison. Murder isn't bad because it's illegal, it's bad because pretty much all ethical systems consider it a terrible thing to randomly kill someone. There's certainly a lot less agreement that a company is ethically obliged to pay a government a double-digit percentage of its earnings if it wants to sell people there things they want to buy.
      • bergstromm466 6y ago
        > This is a pretty ridiculous comparison No it is not ridiculous at all. What is ridiculous is the denial of the effects of the slow-violence of the ascendency of the rentier elite, and the subsequent plunder of the commons. [1] These rentiers pay very little taxes (if any) and park their illicit gains in offshore foreign tax havens. We are also in denial about the scary situation of the Precariat class, both in terms of the extreme inequality and class divide in global North (the USA, Europe, etc.) [2], as well as the divide that exists between the global North and the global South. [3] The biggest factor of the ongoing plundering is the way the US empire enforces the corporatocracy's parasitic intellectual property rights claims: "A globalised intellectual property rights system was immensely strengthened by TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) passed through the World Trade Organisation in 1994, shaped by a few US multinationals, backed by the US and UK governments. This has facilitated the commercialisation, privatisation and colonisation of ideas. Since 1994, the annual filing of patents has more than tripled, with the global stock of patents close to 12 million, each giving monopolistic control of some idea for 20 years or more. Many patents result from publicly-funded research, diminishing the risk. But TRIPS allows corporations to receive monopolistic income for two decades, or use the patent to block others from producing something. Those claiming to believe in free markets should have opposed the trend, but reveal their class-based ideology by keeping quiet. There is evidence that the patent system hinders economic growth and innovation. It merely increases inequality and rentier capitalism. George Osborne, as Chancellor, made it even more blatant with his Patent Box tax break that in practice benefits multinationals coming to Britain if they have patented products, particularly Big Tech and Big Pharma. That tax break merely accentuated the plunder of the intellectual commons." [3] I absolutely see the systemic inequality (and precarity) caused by the artificial scarcity mechanisms, lobbied for by the corporatocracy, as slow-violence and murder. I say all this with the hope that we shift towards social production/Commons-based peer production, with a revolution of the parasitic rentier business models on digital assets, which make no sense anymore in a digital society where information now has a (near)-zero marginal cost of reproduction and transmission: Protocol Cooperativism. [1] and [3] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/plunder-commons-compensate-commoners/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/plunder-commons-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnYhZCUYOxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnYhZCUYOxs [4] https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/01/flipping-corruption-myth-201412094213280135.html https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/01/flipping-c...
• soneil 6y ago
  It sort of is. And isn't. It's a helluva mess we've got ourselves into. Ireland has built its modern economy on being attractive to multinationals. And it's worked. 10 MNCs alone pay 40% of all tax revenue in the country. They've brought jobs and wealth to a country that was previously big in dairy & emigration. For the generation above me, the career path was study, leave, earn your money elsewhere - and perhaps come home one day to start a family. Perhaps. For the generation below me, they can go straight from Uni to FAANG (maybe FAAMG? I think msft are bigger than netflix in Dublin), startups, or elsewhere in the booming tech & pharma sectors. Pandering to MNCs was a good strategy. It paid off. But it's not sustainable - no-one actually wants to win a race to the bottom. I'm not sure biting the hand that feeds us is the best step to make right now though. We need to diversify first. We need to encourage home-grown talent. We need to wean the MNCs off their tax strategies slow enough that we don't startle them, etc. Like it or not we are currently intertwined. That needs to be solved first - otherwise we just turn the tap off and return to the 80s. (Yes I'm biased: I work for an MNC that probably wouldn't be here without this strategy. Without this strategy, I wouldn't be living here.)
  • netcan 6y ago
    Is it a race to the bottom though? I mean, a race to the bottom in the normal sense is cutting taxes or spending money on attracting these companies. We help these companies evade other countries' taxes, not our own. Also, officially, the entities involved in the tax evasion are not related to the entities that actually employ people. Would Google move it european customer support offices without this tax deal? Theoretically, they could take advantage of it without employing anyone in ireland. It's all horribly ambiguous. I've never really understood how it works.
    • soneil 6y ago
      It all gets terribly murky very quickly. For example, we often claim one of our strengths is that we have a highly educated workforce - but this is circular; people take this path because they know there's good work at the other end of it. If we ripped out those MNCs, that highly educated workforce would vanish quicker than you can say J1. There are other benefits to being in Ireland. We have a common-law legal system, which is more familiar to Americans than most continental systems. We mostly speak the same language. We're still in the EU, etc. How much of a presence you need here to make it work, I'm not entirely clear on. But it does seem apparent to me that once you're maintaining a presence anyway, it knocks down the largest barrier to actually building on that presence. For example, it's widely assumed that Apple are only here for the taxes. I think they were originally here as a low-cost entry into Europe. But however it's worked out, last I heard Cork was the only factory (or perhaps the only factory outside the US?) that Apple actually owns. I'm typing this on an iMac that was assembled in Ireland. Apple are a success story - even more so because they're in Cork, rather than everything but everything being built in the Dublin bubble (a separate but very real issue). And taxes aren't the only incentives; I used to work in a building that was sold to DEC (by the Irish Development Agency) for 1 Irish pound - which would have been $1.45 when we left the pound in the 90s. Not sure what it was worth when we sold the building, but .. probably still a close approximation of pocket change. And again, it paid off - it sounds like a story of us "bending over for the yanks", but the site passed through DEC to Gateway to HP to HPE. What started off as a factory for Digital is now stuffed full of developers for HPE. We haven't just had decades of employment out of that deal, but the value of that employment has been constantly rising. Ireland's modernisation is the result of thousands of such stories. But as for a race to the bottom, it sort of is. Factories are being built in Central & Eastern Europe today, for most the same reason they were being built in Ireland in the 70s and 80s. Just as we were trying to undercut France, Germany & the UK to get our leg up - they're trying to undercut us to do the same. I do think there's a point where we need to "pivot" to actually acting like a modern economy, and let other nations take our rung on the ladder - instead of having to lay claim to one even further down. I do agree with the idea that our modern economy shouldn't still depend on being a pseudo tax-haven. I just don't think "hit them as hard as we can" is the right solution, especially while we're still riding on their backs. (To make this look a little less rant, I'll cheer it up with a fine example of a PDP that does not say Maynard on the front) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtape#/media/File:DECTape_unit_for_the_DEC_PDP-11.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtape#/media/File:DECTape_un... https://www.flickr.com/photos/32614724@N06/3045263847 https://www.flickr.com/photos/32614724@N06/3045263847
• granzymes 6y ago
  Only a small amount of the judgement would have eventually gone to Ireland. The big EU countries would have gotten most of it.