Google benefits from approximately no government infrastructure in France, Germany, Italy, or Spain, but they want to get their grubby hands on it nonetheless.
But there's a very particularly European problem here, that of cross-state revenue recognition. A gross receipts tax or similar is one solution, which is also present in four US states: https://taxfoundation.org/state-corporate-income-tax-rates-a...
(Yes, that's a joke in French, but I'm not really about to type a treatise on popular sovereignty in the Spanish constitution for two reasons. Firstly I'm on a phone, and secondly I know nothing about it)
I do wish one day we could have a discussion that didn't have to argue the existence of gonvernment and taxation from first principles, but today is not that day.
This is too unfair. [0]
A tax on Spanish and French revenues is a tax on Spanish and French consumption, which is already charged. If it is advertising revenue, then the tax will be charged on the advertised products and services and likely also on the charges to the advertisers.
L'état, c'est certains d'entre nous!
> I do wish one day we could have a discussion that didn't have to argue the existence of gonvernment and taxation from first principles, but today is not that day.
I'm not arguing for or against taxation as a whole in any sense, with or without first principles. I'm arguing that this particular instantiation does not fit the justifications for the existing tax regime, and serves no purpose but to increase the price of services to the people in these countries (and in order to fund something which has not even been defined).
This taxation, not part of law in any of these countries, is effectively a transaction tax. If the goal is to discourage transactions, then well, go ahead and levy it. Pat yourself on the back knowing that your citizens are doing less business and more of their money is going to the state for whatever purpose the state sees fit.
They directly depend on the infrastructure to reach their customers. And they indirectly depend on the people having a high standard of living which also requires infrastructure. If your country is a 3rd-world shithole without infrastructure you'll have a very hard time selling your products which sit high on maslow's hierarchy.
I use a road to get to work. My work pay my salary. My salary pays amazon for crap delivered to my house. The package comes delivered on the same road. The internet connection I used to visit amazons page is delivered via fiber to my house, funded just like other infrastructure. So the road and fiber was very important for my society being a developed high-income one, which is why I'm buying crap from the internet in the first place.
However, the topic here is the indirect benefit of being a wealthy nation where you can have customers wealthy enough to care about your products in the first place. The argument is that this is the result of something the society or the government did and it whoever benefits from that must pay their share for the access to that benefit, possibly to keep or improve the conditions that lead that wealth in the first place.
And Netflix should be getting a bill from Verizon when their traffic goes though their network.
These countries have mostly tax financed universities free or only with nominal tuitions for students. Without such education system the internet companies would have few customers wealthy enough to create a lot of profit for the company.
But if that US business goes to France and sells to French customers there, then it should pay French taxes in France on the profits made from French customers. All loopholes should be removed.
What happens is that corporate taxes ultimately come from the pockets of customers. Either those companies will raise prices or lower their profits. Either way this will help local companies that currently can't exploits loopholes to pay no taxes and are at an unfair disadvantage. Somebody could see it as protectionism, I think the existence of those loopholes is a bug that has to be fixed.
This is one of the key infrastructure that government provides and Google depends.
As far as I understand, all treaties of this sort are bilateral.
If not someone should figure out how to put a server on a satellite so they could claim no taxes are due as transaction is extraterrestrial.
Tell me how this would be anything but fair.
And Netflix should probably be getting billed from Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, L3, WOW, etc. too since they can only access their customers through their infrastructure.
But hey, those countries ajust want to get their grubby hand in those poor companies.
What the heck has to do your claim of Spain or France being corrupt with Apple or Google declaring losses with record revenues?
While technically they do have offices in Spain and France, they are mainly service offices. The critical operations of Google are carried out in the United States, and to a (far) lesser extent, Canada, Japan, and various other places.
> What the heck has to do your claim of Spain or France being corrupt with Apple or Google declaring losses with record revenues?
It's called expenditure, the vast majority of the wealth Apple and Google generate involves spending a lot of the wealth they made in the past. This is explicitly protected by the tax codes of basically any nation worth doing business in.
Spain, for example, has a rather meh economy, meanwhile the state is funneling public funds into things like a concentrated solar plant which will probably never generate more revenue than expenditure. If not corrupt, then that is at least decadent.
I recommend you sit down, evaluate what you are saying, and try to figure out what on earth that has to do with corporate taxing.
Erm the state isn't a for-profit entity, in fact if it were to generate a profit for some reason and didn't use that money to improve infrastructure and the living conditions of the people it represents then it would've stopped serving its purpose.
It doesn't matter that their investment doesn't generate revenue, it will improve the lives of the people it represents.
You want to do business in a country, you abide by the laws of that country. Governments serve their citizens and their interests. Whatever is convenient for corporations has (or should have) _zero_ bearing on any decisions. In true liberal style: if they don't like the rules they're welcome to go elsewhere.
That said, just because something is legal doesn't make it moral, but even though I think we agree on that, I'd have to argue loopholes are totally in the domain of legislators to fix — if I understand correctly, UK law requires tax payers to report any minimisation schemes they are party to. Does that have teeth? I don't know, but it's a thought.
I have it you view lobbying as having a hand in the code you subsequently exploit, and therefore a major ethics breach ?
I view corporations as non-human intelligences, so while it's totally unethical for a human to manipulate the law to their own ends, it's also something I expect corporations to perceive as acceptable, in as much as that makes sense (they will not shun each other for it) and in much the way we humans generally agree it's wrong to kill but we don't shun people for amputations or appendectomies.
This is why I prefer democratic corporations, rare as they are, to pure capitalist ones — at least the metaphorical appendix has a vote.
I find it fascinating that such emotive language is used. Taxation is pretty much the least "grubby" hand a government has (military: give us all your stuff, legislature: do all our work for us, we will tell you what we think adequate compensation is); and these companies are not only not poor, they are among the richest on the planet and they got almost all of that wealth this century.
But why won't anyone think of those poor, starving, unemployed, multi billion dollar international corporations? :P
I thought that the sarcastic tone was clear :)