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I would 100% support this mindset if tech giants paid taxes where they make their money. I don't know what the situation is like in Australia but in Europe it's
by simias 6y ago
I would 100% support this mindset if tech giants paid taxes where they make their money. I don't know what the situation is like in Australia but in Europe it's pretty insane. You can't abuse the system on one side and then argue the "efficient market hypothesis" on the other.
Google&friends are not making money and competing "like any other business".
- marcus_holmes 6y ago> Google&friends are not making money and competing "like any other business". I don't understand this. Can you explain, please?
- jokethrowaway 6y agoSeveral big-enough companies use tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes or lobby the government themselves. This is not specific to big tech though, it's a single point of failure of having a centralised government that is easily corrupted by rich corporations.
- marcus_holmes 6y agosorry, again, I'm not following you. How does the ineffectiveness of tax regimes mean that Google and friends aren't competing like a normal business?
- thedevilslawyer 6y agoThis reads like sealioning. You really can't see why an entity A that gives 1% in taxes is at an advantage in competing with an entity that gives say 20% in taxes?
- marcus_holmes 6y agobut this behaviour (as said above) is not unique to tech. All sufficiently large, sufficiently multinational businesses effectively stop paying the full rate of tax
- bencollier49 6y agoHave a look at these. If you can afford to pay lawyers to set schemes up like this, then you are at a competitive advantage against businesses which pay regular tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich Take the billions of dollars that you've saved from BEPS and use it to subsidize your local products, or run ads attacking the competition, or taking them to court, or hire salespeople, or build new content. Simple.
- qaq 6y agoRight and say BMW, VW etc are not doing the exact same thing? There is trade imbalance between US and say Germany if both sides introduce equivalent measures it will hurt EU more than it hurts US.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoWe heard that argument so often during the Brexit referendum. It turned out to be rubbish.
- qaq 6y agoAre you seriously comparing size of UK market with the size of US market?
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoUS Sales represent 14.7% of BMW's exports, UK is 9.2%. It is cleary comparable.
- joshuaissac 6y agoBMW and VW are not doing the exact same thing. They pay taxes to the US IRS for their profits made in the US. The argument against Google and Facebook is based on their use of profit-shifting to avoid taxes on European profits.
- nwellnhof 6y ago> They pay taxes to the US IRS for their profits made in the US. That's plain wrong. Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence. The only difference is that there might be a sales tax for physical goods.
- joshuaissac 6y ago>Every company only pays income tax in its country of residence. That is not correct. Taxes are payable wherever the profits are made. It is usually the case that the country where the company is headquartered will have a far greater proportion of profits compared to revenue because a lot of the things that add value happen there, but in the case of large tech companies, this is taken to the extreme, where not just profits, but even revenue itself is shifted from where the business actually happens. For example, Google reported £1.6bn (US$2.1bn) in revenue and paid £44m ($58m) in corporation taxes (on profits of £231m ($303m) based on a 19% tax rate) in the UK for the 2019-20 financial year, but its actual UK revenue is estimated to be around £5.7b ($7.5b) for the same period.[1] Whereas car companies have consumers as their customers and have to pay sales tax, AdWords expenditure by businesses is considered a business expense and is not taxed (in the UK). If they played by the same rules, they would have paid around £1.14b ($1.5b; based on 20% VAT) in tax in 2019-20, instead of £44m. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/07/google-uk-staff-earned-average-of-234000-in-2019 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/07/google-uk...
- mxxx 6y agoSituation in Australia is that they pay zero.
- Cakez0r 6y agoCountries are competing in a market for tax revenue too. If a country wants more tax revenue from a business, they can either close the legal loopholes that allow the business to reduce the amount of tax that they pay or make their tax laws more competitive with those of other countries.
- mordae 6y agoOMG, this is golden. It's a race to the bottom. It ends up completely destroying states and replacing them with corporations.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoI like your comment, not sure if you are joking though. A few decades ago when I started reading William Gibson’s cyber punk sci-fi, I often wondered if the corporate run enclaves in his stories would anticipate real events.
- jp555 6y agolook to the law MAKERS, not the law followers.
- Aunche 6y agoHow does exploiting tax loopholes have anything to do with the success of news media? Arbitrary fines and taxes are one thing. Forcing Google and Facebook to help the news sets a completely new precedent.