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136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate
- zw123456 5y agoStep 1) global harmonization of trade Step 2) common monetary system Step 3) global harmonization of tax structure Step 3) one global government (similar to EU) Is that a good thing or a bad thing ? Yes.
- ed_elliott_asc 5y agoas long as Americans don’t go mad and get another crazy elected
- Ekaros 5y agoI think that is kinda forgone now... How many of them do they now have in row? Going back to at least Clinton, maybe further...
- nine_k 5y agoNot really "global", but mostly "western", I'd say. What are the upsides of homogenization? Efficiency and predictability when all goes well. What are the downsides of homogenization? Lack of innovation and fragility when everything stops going all that well.
- telotortium 5y agoI think the tech companies will keep their headquarters in Ireland even after this - Ireland is still not going to raise it's corporate tax rate above 15%, there's inertia, and Ireland is now the only native English-speaking country in the EU (except maybe for Malta).
- crishoj 5y agoThe greater impact of the agreement as I understand it will come from the requirement for companies to pay taxes in the countries where they do business, and not just in the country of registration.
- ensignavenger 5y agoWhenever some one visits Hacker News, where is Ycombinator "doing business" from? The country where the visitor is located? The country where the Hacker News moderators/programmers are located? The country where Ycombinator is headquartered? The location of the Hacker News servers? The location of the advertisers on HackerNews? If each country makes up their own tax rules to determine where Ycombinator is doing business, then a company may have to pay 200% of their total revenue in taxes to cover all the different locations that could claim business was being conducted there.
- aspenmayer 5y agoI would be surprised if double taxation was not addressed or considered.
- tweedledee 5y agoI think there is a single entity that determines allocation. Details TBD. It’s a one liner in the following doc; https://www.oecd.org/tax/beps/statement-on-a-two-pillar-solution-to-address-the-tax-challenges-arising-from-the-digitalisation-of-the-economy-october-2021.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/beps/statement-on-a-two-pillar-solu...
- ensignavenger 5y agoI just now read that... a lot of details to be worked out, and lot of opportunity for this to fail long before implementation.
- tweedledee 5y agoIt’s a back door federalization. Members will have to conform to additional TBD rules or put their tax allocation at risk.
- asdff 5y agoIs the language barrier really an issue when you have nations like Germany where half the population speaks english? When you consider knowledge worker germans I wouldn't be surprised if this jumps up to U.S. proportions where 78% of the population speaks english.
- tommiegannert 5y ago> I think the tech companies will keep their headquarters in Ireland even after this I agree they probably won't leave. Ireland is cheap for labour as well. (It has/had one of Google's lowest salary levels, for instance.) However, it will make new companies question moving there. I was in Ireland when Brexit was becoming a reality. My guess was that Fintechs would flee London into Dublin, but it looked like many went to Amsterdam. English is fairly widespread in continental Europe now. Even Switzerland (which already has four national/federation languages, depending on region) is slowly moving towards English as second language.
- dantheman 5y agoI think this type of harmonization is incredibly harmful and reduces experimentation among states. I personally think the concept of corporate taxes doesn't make sense and encourages reckless behavior - there are a lot of unintended consequences do this. We should be encouraging experimentation in governance. It's the same how inflation doesn't just devalue the currency, it encourages riskier behavior because investors must seek higher returns.
- booleanbetrayal 5y agoThis is experimentation in governance. What better way to encourage that than to provide an illustration as these 136 countries are doing?
- Glyptodon 5y agoThe thing is non-harmonization doesn't really promote experimentation, it promotes competitive-market-leading behavior. Obviously there are limits to how much it matters - lots more startups in CA compared to South Dakota. But I don't think there's a lot of evidence that non-harmonization provides an incentive to experiment, so much as it makes countries have economic incentives to treat things like a zero sum game.
- thaumasiotes 5y agohttps://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/09/the-world-forager-elite.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/09/the-world-forager-eli...
- RNCTX 5y agoI think you're in need of some further reading. 1) UN resolutions don't have any enforcement weight, which is why they're so popular with politicians who run on the statement "nothing will fundamentally change." 2) Taxes should be paid by whoever retains earnings, and in that case corporate taxes make a lot of sense. And yes, buying back your own shares to drive share values higher for current shareholders is "retaining earnings" and should be taxed at not just capital gains, but individual income levels since individual income is what such activity creates.
- entropyneur 5y agoSounds like a cartel.
- ceejayoz 5y agoCartels are entirely legal on the international stage. See OPEC as a clear example.
- fulafel 5y agoSounds good, a tax race to the bottom hurts many more counries than it helps, it's a negative sum game. What's the previous % been so far in major western counries, anyone got a link?
- sharkjacobs 5y agoUS: 21% China: 15%/25% Japan: 29.74% Germany: 29.65% UK: 19% France: 26.5% India: 15%/22% Italy: 27.9% Countries with two values listed have different rates for different types of companies e.g. China has a lower rate for “high-tech” companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
- glogla 5y agoThat makes this sound more like a corporate win - 15 % is already the lowest one, and this agreement can be used as a way to wiggle out from something more useful, like revenue tax or VAT.
- ArnoVW 5y agoThese countries were not the problem cases. If you compare it with Ireland however : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Repub... "Ireland's "headline" corporation tax rate is 12.5%, however, foreign multinationals pay an aggregate § Effective tax rate (ETR) of 2.2–4.5% on global profits "shifted" to Ireland, via Ireland's global network of bilateral tax treaties."
- Proven 5y agoClearly you're completely clueless about economics. A tax race to the bottom doesn't hurt anyone but bureaucrats, statists and globalists.
- fallingfrog 5y agoOn one level, this is a good thing as there has been a race to the bottom going on in terms of taxes for some time. But on another level, this is very bad because national tax policy is now being set by unelected diplomats instead of congress. It's an ominous admission that western democracy is now unable to operate as it's meant to and set policy in a way that reflects the desires and interests of the citizens. I know that worrying about national sovereignty is usually a right wing thing, but there is some truth to it- when the economy is international the bodies with the most power are the international economic agencies and banks. For example it's well known that Greek government policy after the financial crisis was dictated to them by the European Central Bank and the IMF. Likewise the World Bank and the IMF set policy for a large swath of the global south. And none of those people are elected.
- tweedledee 5y agoIt could be worse; they could have taken over via conquest (war).
- lovich 5y ago> It's an ominous admission that western democracy is now unable to operate as it's meant to and set policy in a way that reflects the desires and interests of the citizens. That comes off as a little hyperbolic to me. Those governments are supposedly already taking choices they feel reflect the desires and interests of their citizens which means entering into this tax agreement is such a reflection. There’s no world government enforcing that states remain a member of this agreement so they can always leave them later if their citizens feel that way as well. It’s not like this was done entirely out of altruism from states looking out for their fellow man. Nation states are pretty nakedly self interested hence the phrase “nations have no friends only interests”. They all must feel they are getting something from the deal
- nescioquid 5y ago> tax policy is now being set by unelected diplomats instead of congress. Each nation will have to ratify the agreement. It is nominally true that congress sets tax policy, though that overlooks the golden horde of lobbyists that descend upon Congress with ready-made bills. It is also true that a representative or senator ought to make decisions based on the best interests of their constituents, rather than donors and their lobbyist pals (who might land them a lucrative gig after office).
- lovich 5y agoDid something happen to cause mutual cooperation between most of the planet to be viewed as a bad thing? All these countries have come to an agreement by negotiation instead of economic or martial war. Why is there such pessimism/paranoia about this deal in this thread?
- brodouevencode 5y agoOperating under the assumption that most replies are from US citizens: the people of the US have a love/hate relationship with taxes. Most of the time theyre fine with taxing others so that they could reap the benefits, they just dont want to be taxed themselves.
- burnafter182 5y agoGlobalism is inherently fragile. This is part of a continued trend which has enough inertia to carry us to an inflection point where it could conceivably destroy everything human, either in real terms or something less tractable. We made a wrong turn a very long time ago, and since we've been extraordinarily misdirected but inextricably committed to the mistake we've made. We're totally in the dark, and truth becomes ever more indefinite as we travel down this timeline and the path we [never] elected. You see, the way that we made exchange was translated from a moral domain to a material domain, which was finally transposed to a symbolic one. Dollar valuations of a lifetimes is an intrinsically abhorrent concept. A life can never be repaid, thus it can never be valued in real terms - yet it is, billions of times over. Globalism is just a long-range result of this. Exploitation and undervaluing of billions of lives in order to create increasingly competitive products to grow dollar values of a investments in the hands of an increasingly small proportion of the population. This itself founded on false pretense. Every move towards globalism is increasingly dangerous, this is no exception.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tomohawk 5y agothere's what's written, and then there's what's done.
- amai 5y agoI still think it would be better to not have any corporate taxes at all. If corporations have to pay taxes they also want to have a say in politics. But that leads to all these corporate friendly but human unfriendly decisions. Instead if you agree a state should do what is good for it’s people only people should be allowed to pay taxes.