Comment by ArkanExplorer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ArkanExplorer | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as someone who runs a B2C IT company in Europe, what would really help is:

- 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 agree with some of these, but the sales tax isn't the issue imho. If you're buying from a third country, you'll have to pay your local sales tax (as import sales tax), not doing so is tax fraud.

Upvoted because it's not a bad, offensive, or content-free comment, so it doesn't deserve to disappear even if one doesn't agree with it.

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.

1. A CO2 level of 950ppm (or higher) produces a noticeable cognitive decline when compared to 550pm: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27662232/4892924...

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.

1. There is a long way to go before Chinese cities are on the same pollution levels as most of Western Europe, likely even Eastern Europe. I personally don't see it as much of a priority. That's really the sort of thing you guys have to sort out on your own, imho.

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.

> A lot of it is just garden-variety right-wing freemarketism, with all due respect;

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.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, all of this is quite sensible.

Taxes shouldn't be a problem if you have basic things taken care of: education, health, security, infrastructures. That's something you have to take into account when you work in most of the EU countries and that's taken for granted.

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.

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