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Comment by kubiiii | Hacker News Reader

Let's imagine the following situation. A big EU country heavilly invests in digital technologies and ensures all of its citizens have access to fiber for exemple.

This kind of investment would heavilly rely on taxes, but would also create the ideal conditions for internet giants to make lots of business.

These internet giants chose to put their headquarter in a small EU country that chose to lower the taxes to attract companies. This country doesnt care for fiber, and doesnt make investment at all, but its no big deal, it only represents a tiny part of the EU ppl.

This is a nonsense to pay taxes in a country for business made in another one. Unfortunately this nonsense is part of the UE.

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Sounds like a very hypothetical idea, and a bad reason to call one country a "parasite" because they choose to make things a bit better for businesses. Note also that I'm not agreeing with the various loopholes, just the idea of lower corporate taxes.

Should other EU countries have to import Italian bureaucrats just to even the playing field some? I bet the Germans wouldn't be so competitive with the addition of a good selection of public employees from Rome.

This is hypothetical. Irish people do have network infrastructures and French people do have a huge amount of redundant/useless bureaucrats.

But still, a country lowering taxes to a point where it would attract most of the income of companies operating throughout EU is acting like a parasite, the host being the EU, the blood being the income.

Lowering corporate taxes should be made at the EU level. Because the EU was not intended as a playing field with EU countries competing against eachothers but rather as something more symbiotic where countries specificities would help compete against the rest of the world.

> But still, a country lowering taxes to a point where it would attract most of the income of companies operating throughout EU is acting like a parasite, the host being the EU, the blood being the income.

Makes for good political rhetoric, but I don't think it bears much relation to reality.

Germany for instance is not 'shriveling up and dying' because of Ireland, and neither is France for that matter.

Also, the economy is, fortunately, not a zero sum game with a fixed lump of money to go around.

You only need to look at the US as an example: California and NY are not low-tax states, and yet... and yet... there are a lot of companies and a lot of business there.

And yes, US states compete.

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