So any taxation is justified?
> It's not arbitrary to expect businesses to pay for services they benefit from.
Any digital company with revenue of more than €750m ($850m; £670m) - of which at least €25m is generated in France - would be subject to the levy.
That sounds arbitrary.
That's a straw man. You're leaping from "some type of tax is justified" which is quite a bit more reasonable than "any tax".
And if you want to say it's a slippery slope or some such, well, ever single action if extrapolated to the extreme can be a viewed as such. If 3% is reasonable and then it's proposed to goes up and up, fight the increase, not the initial reasonable action. Of course this may be putting words in your mouth, so I won't attribute it to you, only that I preempt a logical counter to mine.
We can argue whether that's a good thing or not, but not whether there's a slippery slope when it comes to implementing a new tax.
> We can argue whether that's a good thing or not, but not whether there's a slippery slope when it comes to implementing a new tax.
Dude what? Wealth redistribution? Lots of countries have much higher taxes that actually redistribute that wealth. Don't call our system socialist, it isn't. Have you ever lived in socialism (I have)? It isn't even here in California!
And even if I couldn't name a tax that was repealed, many are way lower than in the past.
Peasants would rebel because they'd be taxed to (literal!) death.
Taxes get repealed all the time. My province just repealed its carbon tax a few weeks ago: https://www.alberta.ca/carbon-tax-repeal.aspx
Window tax. 1990s UK Poll tax. The luxury tax token system the US used before sales taxes.
No, it isn't.
Road tax pays for road maintenance. Municipal tax pays for municipal maintenance. VAT and Income Tax pay for government expenditure. Taxes are collected in exchange for a service.
Foreign businesses providing entirely digital services in France aren't actually receiving any kind of service back from the French government. In other words, this specific tax is just a mechanism for collecting money arbitrarily in exchange for nothing.
That's a slippery slope.
You've just ignored all the above posts without addressing them. The other posts make it clear without any counter argument from you that government provides a safe and stable addressable market to do business (and literally the currency).
Because the dollars being used to pay for the digital good have already been taxed, probably many times over, by the time the credit card transaction settles and the merchant account is credited at the end of the week (or whenever).
It’s reasonable to question if this particular tax was designed in a way to target specific foreign companies, without a compelling nexus, which would make the tax predatory.
Amazon doesn't pay taxes when they're the merchant.
How does a government quantify providing "a safe and stable addressable market to do business"? What was the formula used to determine the tax bracket?
Unless we have a clear formula we can reason about, the tax would be arbitrary. Is that not the case?
Moreover, shouldn't the cost of providing "a safe and stable addressable market to do business" be a constant? We know how many French citizens utilize the service, and we should also (somehow) have the overall costs of "keeping the French market afloat". If so, why does the government tax a percentage of the total revenues?
If you're looking for a simple and logically designed system, the international tax system isn't it.
Think of it backwards: if we agree that X level of taxes need to be gathered to maintain common good, the government needs to gather it in the least unjust way possible. Taxing internet giants, to europeans, seem mostly just.
A corp will raise prices to whatever level the market will bear. Why shouldn't a society do the same with taxes?
Inter-country competition helps to keep them honest, and corporations get to choose the luxury of where they operate from and do business out of.
There's value in competition, because it's about the closest we've been able to get to evolution. The issue comes about when competition is lopsided - I can understand the complaint here from the French, but I don't care at all for their solution.
A corp exists in a competitive market and can rarely raise prices to "whatever level the market will bear". If I don't like their prices, I use their competitor.
What competitor does my mandatory government and it's confiscatory tax agency have? What alternative do I have but to hand over half my work to them to be frittered away on foreign wars and grants for indolence and incompetence?
Isn't that exactly what VAT tax is for?
>And where does your assessment comes from? Just guess?
An educated guess that I am strongly confident in, to the point of willing to bet most of my savings on it. And I am not the kind of person who would usually bet any money on anything at all. My most risky money bet so far is putting a portion of my paycheck in 401k.
And yes, this makes it very hard for new businesses to enter the market as they do not have the resources necessary to do tax optimization.
Edit: I don't work for Amazon, though my brother does. I also don't work at a company that has much of a stake in this fight.
Administrative burden limits are not arbitrary. They are used in many places all over the world.
Yes. We have income tax in the US. It's the same thing.
Google doesn't have to pay the tax if they're not operating in the country. It says right there that if their revenues are +$25m a year, they are subject to the tax. Conversely, the US can also levy taxes against French digital services, and maybe they should.
My guess is the cost of not operating in France is much higher than the tax to do so, so that would be a silly maneuver.
Tangentially, I find it hilariously hypocritical that the Trump administration is whining about unfair tariffs on digital services.