Europe’s Digital Decade: digital targets for 2030
ec.europa.eu
ec.europa.eu
* the EU will give even more money to big EU corporation to produce very little
* we will have 5G by force if need be (I don't believe it's inherently harmful but I just love things done by force when my net is, honestly... fast enough)
* all my data will be pushed by force into EU "clouds", from identity to health data to whatever else so we can encourage some local data mining operations too
* more regulations will be introduced which will mean only big business will dream of afford filling all the forms so my small business will be, as usual, ignored.
In the mean time, I dread having a customer in another EU country due to the damn VAT which requires a separate fiscal/declaratory dance.
But that would be too easy, wouldn’t it...?
This is a somewhat dangerous path (what if those processes are never agreed?!?) but in practice it's much easier than persuading 27 tribes, from first principles, that they should follow a single chief.
Maybe I'm wrong, but if I recall correctly the EU already has a floor set on VAT rates. You may have yours be lower but not by a lot.
The reason North America, Australia, China are such attractive markets to sell into is because of their low sales tax rates.
When sales taxes are high, it artificially increases the price of a product such that only the biggest and most established companies and product categories can survive.
The American approach of taxing land/property heavily, and consumption minimally, is much more successful at actually encouraging innovation.
Just use pollution, plastic, and obesity taxes to target unsustainable or unhealthy consumption.
This is obviously wrong, each of these markets has a) vastly different tax rates (e.g. tax revenue per GDP per capita in China is 50% higher than that of the US) and taxation mechanics, and b) vastly different reasons for their respective releveance (i.e. industrialization in China, but raw materials in Australia).
> The reason North America, Australia, China are such attractive markets to sell into is because of their low sales tax rates.
Not really. The attractiveness is the ratio of population times buying power over required cost and effort: (P x B) / (C + E). In those markets, in most sectors, you do your paperwork once and that's it, you get access to hundreds of millions of customers, so overall the Effort factor ends up being very low. The EU has probably the highest PxB factor, but it's bogged down by fragmentation both at the cultural level (dozens of languages) and at the bureaucratic level (dozens of very different legal and taxation systems), making E much higher than it could be. Cultural differences are not going away anytime soon, but unnecessary technical ones should be slowly eroded - which is what the EU project has largely been about, under the banner of "harmonization".
So the problem is not necessarily the level of taxation. If the club is really really good once inside, businesses will have no problem paying a high "entrance fee" and following a strict "dress code". But if they also have to pay a different fee every time they enter a different room and follow a different dress code, then they will probably not come back.
For what it's worth, the EC recognizes that this is a huge issue, and it is discussed in e.g. the 2020 tax package action plan: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/2...
> However, tax compliance costs remain high in the EU. Particularly, we need to support young and innovative businesses that struggle more with administrative complexity than big multinationals. Compliance costs are typically substantially higher for small than for large companies. Estimated tax compliance costs for large companies amount to about 2% of taxes paid, while for SMEs the estimate is about 30% of taxes paid. Moreover, the complexity that arises from the patchwork of 27 different tax systems not only creates loopholes for tax abuse, but also uncertainty for honest taxpayers that are simply overwhelmed and thus inadvertently do not comply with the rules.
Whether the actions they've outlined will remedy this remains to be seen, but at least they are trying.
Skills: Subsidize training 80% of the population to use american digital products
Business: Subsidize 75% of businesses to sign up to AWS
Infrastructure: Subsidize imported chinese 5G equipment
Government: Move everything online (that is great actually), but it will be Azure.
(MS and amazon are building datacenters throughout europe)
The major benefit of all the visionary EU programmes is lots of administrative dashboards, training in making reports in MS word and Powerpoint. I m torn whether that's the best way to give stimulus instead of just raining money from a helicopter.
- What's the ratio of non-technical bureaucrats to engineer in the author list of this report?
- What's the plan for a unified market (incorportate anywhere, sell anywhere, just works). No special snowflake legislation for every city-sized market.
- What's the plan regarding engineer compensation, non-compete and equity ownership among engineering staff?
- What's the plan to address brain drain?
These are the real issues.
- Standard for English language education across the continent, so that I can hire someone from another country without their children being denied an education because they don't speak an obscure local language
- Set and enforce standards for apartment ventilation, noise insulation, and air pollution, since in many Eastern European countries workers are suffering in sub-standard apartments (including new ones) when trying to work from home.
- Get rid of all payroll taxes, increase the pension age to 70 (or privatise pensions) in order to fund this change. I can't hire a 'rockstar programmer' with a good salary if 50%+ of the labour budget is swallowed by taxes for him and me (instead I will just hire him as a B2B freelancer, which is not something that is scalable, and presents him with an additional compliance burden).
- Reduce sales taxes across the bloc to the legal minimum - 16% - in order to encourage sales to EU customers (instead of American or Chinese customers, where a sale is much more rewarding due to their lower sales tax rates)
- Get rid of the endless series of grants and handouts which reward the companies best at filling out forms and justify the huge EU bureaucracy, instead of those companies best at actually selling products that people and businesses want. (Use these savings to cut VAT)
- Rollback or simplify cookie popup warnings, GDPR, to reduce the compliance burden.
- Increase border security, and disincentivise/punish/reverse irregular immigration flows, in order to reduce the welfare burden on states, and increase the price of manual labour - to incentivise AI and automation. (For example, huge sections of farmland in southern Europe [1] are worked by irregular migrants, for illegal wages and without rights, reducing the incentive to automate these operations - contacts that would go to EU tech companies).
[1]https://www.dw.com/en/spains-sea-of-plastic-where-europe-get...
I don't agree with most of this agenda though. A lot of it is just garden-variety right-wing freemarketism, with all due respect; and most of it is really in the realm of things that nation-states are better positioned to tackle. It's also largely not related to digital matters.
Some points:
- it's a bit ironic to complain about EU bureaucracy on one hand, then on the other to ask Bruxelles to regulate building standards, down to ventilation (!), across a very diverse continent.
- "Get rid of all payroll taxes" is obviously a non-starter, particularly in countries where these are the only taxes guaranteed to be collected, but it's not really a EU matter anyway. What could definitely be done at central level, though, is to simplify cross-border procedures for workers who live in one country but work remotely in another. This would actually be a good candidate area for diverting some responsibility and money towards Bruxelles/Strasbourg.
- Again, nation states should deal with their agri practices, no need for EU to be involved unless there are internal competition issues.
- "border security" cannot increase in the Mediterranean Sea. Militarizing the sea even more is just going to make things worse: the more ships are around, the more illegal traffickers are empowered to send dinghies and rely on humanitarian efforts to rescue people at the other end. So you'd be spending more and likely obtain the opposite of what you're looking for. Some of that was attempted (the "Mare Nostrum" strategy), and the results incensed right-wing parties so much that they scrapped it shortly thereafter.
I have lived across new buildings in Eastern Europe and there are very few if any buildings which can reach 550pm, typically they will sit at 950ppm. (Admittedly I cannot speak to ventilation quality in Western/Central Europe)
If the EU desires digital leadership it needs to solve this cognitive burden. Europe is uniquely at risk here, because their main competitors (USA and China) sit at lower latitudes where houses can be more leaky.
2. Payroll taxes are mostly absent in the USA, UK, Australia, Scandinavia. They can be replaced with income taxes or land taxes, or simply by reducing Government spending by increasing the aged pension rate (the welfare system occupies about 50% of National Government spending).
These are important because the Tech industry is unique for individual exceptionalism in talent and salaries. If a USA startup pays 3% of a salary in payroll, but as an EU startup I pay 35%, how can I compete? Either my labour costs are much higher or the salaries I can offer are much lower.
3. The EU has freedom of movement so agricultural practices and workers need policies at a bloc-level. Australia has been successful in controlling its borders, and for the past several years has had essentially zero unauthorised boat arrivals, despite its huge coastline:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/St...
We as tech workers should realise that if these workers are removed from economies, the demand for automation and AI will increase, meaning greater demand for tech skills.
2. this is, politically, a non-starter. As a voter, I would not agree with it. I think there is margin in every country to tweak policies according to local needs, but a blanket continent-wide ban is unrealistic and unlikely to appear anytime soon.
3. It's unrealistic to compare a big isolated landmass surrounded by massive oceans, with a complex territory surrounded by a pretty shallow sea and a massive land border. In addition, Australia effectively employed inhumane practices, with all that they entail (including protracted legal cases), and stained the reputation of the country probably forever in terms of human rights. But I don't think this is a topic for HN, the purported link between migration and mechanization is extremely tenuous.
I have no horse in this race but can exactly the same thing can be said about your own response? Garden-variety of ineffective left-wing agenda that hasn’t worked, with all due respect, of-course.
When arguing, I recommend not using sweeping statements like this, even when you mean no harm. It is a shallow dismissal.
While both employer and employee are paying 50% taxes, you're doing so within a mostly public service framework. You might argue it's not good, or doesn't work properly, or has margin for improvement, and you're right, but it's overall pretty good.
Also being taxed at 50% bracket, unless you want to be in the most hyped cities, you can live a great life in the EU. Like, it doesn't even make sense for "rockstar programmer" to strive for a SV paycheck anywhere in Europe, the reality is so different (cultural, costs of living, cost of entertainment, etc).
That's why I commented on your previous post that you seem to want Europe to be something different, that's on a completely different direction the EU is going.
About sales taxes, it seems that in July 2021 every business that want's to sell to EU customers they must collect and deliver sales taxes to the country of the buyer, periodically. So that will level-out a bit more the playing field, where people would gamble stuff wouldn't be checked by customs. Now the EU should pressure to end the subsidized exports from China.
I agree with you about set the Standard to English, and reform grants based on bureaucracy, and GDPR should be indeed simplified at least for small businesses that aren't hoarding data.
>Increase border security
This is a complex problem, where border security won't simply fix it.