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Comment by astrolx | Hacker News Reader

"The math".

We don't have issue with the math, we just disagree on what to fund to balance things out.

An example, 200+ billion euros are given yearly to large companies as tax breaks and the like, without the government asking anything in return. The senate had a report about it recently [https://www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/economie/un-cout-annue...].

Another example, the military and defense get a huge increase in budget. schools, hospitals, research, nearly every public service get a budget cut instead [ https://www.force-ouvriere.fr/non-aux-44-milliards-d-economi...].

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>An example, 200+ billion euros are given yearly to large companies as tax breaks and the like, without the government asking anything in return.

Man, that must feel like the rug pull of the century for French taxpayers, given that despite these tax breaks, French companies like Airbus and ST are incorporated in the Netherlands and paying(more like, NOT) taxes there instead of France.

I'd be pissed too, and I'd want my money back.

Unless of course the purpose of those tax breaks was actually to keep some jobs in France and not see more of them move to cost efficient places like eastern Europe or north Africa.

They probably pay much less tax there. That's the whole point, they wouldn't go through the whole trouble for nothing.

Sounds like eliminating the NL's ability to give secret sweetheart deals to major billion dollar corporations that also benefit from tax breaks in other countries, would fix some of these problems.

If you build/design your products here then you use EU's trained labor, EU's infrastructure, EU's legal system, EU's defense, etc. then you should pay your fair share to support these facilities that help you be a billion dollar corporation.

I'm usually against "big governement", and generally against the EU, and more on the side of "laissez-faire".

But I have a hard time understanding how politicians figured that countries with widely varying tax regimes inside an economic union would work out for the countries with a taste for high taxes.

It makes no sense to me. Of course companies are going to choose the most favorable location to incorporate. Counting on companies to be "fair-play" or whatever the politician word-of-the-day is seems completely braindead to me. Unless there were some kind of backroom deals going on, which wouldn't surprise me one bit coming from the EU nomeklatura, and now they're trying to conceal it by blaming "the rich" / "corporate greed".

> It makes no sense to me. Of course companies are going to choose the most favorable location to incorporate. Counting on companies to be "fair-play" or whatever the politician word-of-the-day is seems completely braindead to me. Unless there were some kind of backroom deals going on, which wouldn't surprise me one bit coming from the EU nomeklatura, and now they're trying to conceal it by blaming "the rich" / "corporate greed".

So the issue is more around transfer pricing, which wasn't really a thing until relatively recently. This has a really, really large impact on services, particularly computer enabled services, whereas in a world where most GDP comes from goods it's not really as big a deal (as you can tax the value-add from a factory much easier than you can from a software sales deal).

Unfortunately, the big corporations put a lot of money into finding ways around whatever law you pass, and the EU are not united on this stuff, at all, at all.

> If you build/design your products here then you use EU's trained labor, EU's infrastructure, EU's legal system, EU's defense, etc. then you should pay your fair share to support these facilities that help you be a billion dollar corporation.

What EU country do you live in?

The only way to make this happen is to work really hard on electing national politicians who will do that, and then change the Treaties to make it possible.

The EU does not currently have these powers, maybe it should?

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