Global Tax Deal Targets Multinationals | Hacker News Reader

Global Tax Deal Targets Multinationals

ft.com

22 pointspaulsutter22 comments

Good job to OECD for leading the way, as it often does, but these are mostly guidelines. The devil will, as usually, cavort in the details of each country's own implementation and related treaties. I don't have the time to go through all produced material, but if it results in actions similar to the European VAT-mess, they could end up being a lot of red tape for little gain.

There is also a real risk that some of these actions will be used as political capital to spend against the implementation of T^^IP treaties, which could be even more pernicious than a bit of tax evasion.

Of course, there will be the issue of forcing smaller countries to comply -- it took a decade of continuous brinkmanship to (sort-of) getting the likes of Cayman to accept the minimum amount of scrutiny; it's fair to expect larger changes to encounter more resistance.

  which could be even more pernicious than a bit of tax evasion.

Calling "up to $250bn a year in extra tax revenues" a bit of tax evasion is a tad disengineous, don't you think?

It's 250bn around dozens of countries, i.e. a few billions here and there -- worth paying attention to, but not enough to sell all our rights for. I'd rather let them get away with a few billions than become (even more of) an indentured servant for Big Corp.

The Irish Times has a non-paywalled version:

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/global-tax-deal-t...

Go there through google:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Because I'm sure these governments will spend the extra $250 billion/year so much more productively than the companies they're taking it from... (not.)

Considering most of this untaxed money sits idle in some Caribbean virtual bank, yes, even using it to dig holes would be a more productive use.

If that money sits there in U.S. dollars or any other central-bank issued paper money then "sitting" money is a non-issue. Central bank can increase money supply and direct it through government or banking system to holes digging efforts to keep current employment levels (aka monetary easing). The hard part is to unwind it when that money which was sitting there starts moving. Then we will probably see some inflation. Easing is easy, tightening hard.

>Considering most of this untaxed money sits idle in some Caribbean virtual bank

It's not idle. Those carribean virtual banks buy a lot of empty condos in big cities with tight housing markets all around the world.

God forbid that money would all be taxed away. Prices and rents might come down and those condos would start to fill up with people... What a waste

>"It's not idle. Those carribean virtual banks buy a lot of empty condos in big cities with tight housing markets all around the world."

And who do they buy it from? And what do those individuals do with that money?

Property development corporations I guess.

The point is that it disperses throughout the economy anyways. Money doesn't magically disappear into nothingness when it is invested, as it seemed in the earlier comment. It eventually get's used by someone to buy something.

>The point is that it disperses throughout the economy anyways.

The point is that the wealth trickles up and is getting less and less dispersed. That ought to be obvious to anybody paying attention in the last 10 years.

Assuming that's true, and you want to social-engineer your populace into some sort of "equality" utopia, then I can see why you might think that to be a problem.

Unfortunately, we can disagree on that latter part as I believe in absolute individual freedom from violence and coercion. That definitely includes state engineering.

I'd rather it sit in a Caribbean bank than be spent killing people in foreign conflicts. Also, what's wrong with saving money? Not all money needs to be constantly spent.

Fascinating premise, utterly buried behind a paywall. Tried a different browser, tried 'Private Mode', nothing. Please update with a non-paywalled link.

The best way to access such news sites is to search for the article title on google, and then click the top link from the results page.

Google the exact title and you will find it. There is no paywall when you enter from google.

This usually only works for me when I google English language newspaper articles, though. When I google articles in other languages, Google somehow allow the newspapers to apply their paywall.

There's a "web" link under the title at the top now. Click that and you can click through to the article on Google to bypass the paywall.

I think HN should institute a policy that only links that are actually accessible can be posted. This is the web — and while it is perfectly fine to put things behind paywalls, one should not expect that people will link to them on open sites like HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Paywalls are fine; asking for help to get around the paywall is fine; complaining about paywalls is off topic.

Oh, I haven't seen that posting. Thanks.

I disagree, but since those are the rules, I'll comply.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com