
Luxembourg challenges EU order to recover tax from Amazon - mgiannopoulos
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-amazon-luxembourg-taxavoidance/luxembourg-challenges-eu-order-to-recover-tax-from-amazon-idUSKBN1E917S
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jimnotgym
I got one am very pleased to see the EU doing good work against tax havens.
It's no wonder the British press hate the EU so much... the proprietors, in
general, have an interesting record when it comes to paying tax

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NotSammyHagar
But this race to the bottom for tax rates is clearly bad. Luxembourg could
next make their rate 1%. Then Eire could come back with 0.5%. There's no good
that comes of this - even the countries with the low rates are hurting their
ability to raise enough money from tax. It only works in the short term when
you have companies that cheat and book revenue from outside into that country.
It's wrong and I would strongly support both (1) trying to stop the low rates,
and (2) book money in other countries than you earn it. It's all just a bs tax
dodge.

~~~
SamReidHughes
The EU governments could just stop taxing corporate income entirely, and only
tax personal income, sales, and property. There's no reason in principle why
corporations must be income taxed.

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nitwit005
And then everyone stops being an employee to become a tax free one person
contracting company, with car, home office, and anything else they can think
of, considered business expenses.

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gsnedders
If they get personal benefit from the car, that's taxable income. If they get
personal benefit from the home, that's taxable income.

~~~
nitwit005
Sure, but unless you have tax inspectors following the entire population
around and security cameras in their home, you're never going to be able to
enforce that, as demonstrated by people already doing this sort of scheme.
It's easier to just disincentivize it in the first place.

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expertentipp
As an individual person without an army of lawyers and accountants try having
EUR 1000 of unregulated taxes and you'll stir the wrath of the Olympus.

~~~
lumberjack
Plus corporate taxes are already very low. The highest nominal tax rates in
Europe are around 30%, but that is misleading. The actual real tax rates are
somewhere from 5% to 10%, because every country has these "ifs and buts"
clauses, that they use to lower corporate taxes, and effective act as a tax
haven, while pretending they are not.

Coincidentally, I just checked this statistic on OECD: corporate tax revenue
is just around 4% to 8% of total tax revenue. I wonder where these
corporations would be if the normal people weren't contributing ~90% of tax
revenue for upkeep of state infrastructure, that enables the existence of
these businesses in the first place.

[https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-on-corporate-
profits.htm](https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-on-corporate-profits.htm)

~~~
pendar747
That's true, but it's worth mentioning that income tax also doesn't seem to be
a large portion of most country's GDP. It seems to range between 1% to 14%,
except Denmark (25%) which is an outlier. See: [https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-
on-personal-income.htm#indicat...](https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-on-personal-
income.htm#indicator-chart). The global average is only 8%!

Another interesting fact is that in the graph for corporate profit, Luxembourg
actually has the highest rates, which must be because of its small size and
huge number of companies that are registered there to benefit from the
countries low tax rate.

Despite this I think corporate should be higher judging how much large
multinationals earn. Otherwise the income inequality is only going to grow
further.

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lumberjack
Actually, I looked into it more, in my country, the Netherlands, and over all
it is split: 55% individual contributions, 45% business contributions.

Income taxes are just plain income taxes. There are also social security
contributions, part of which is paid by the employer. I know it is not
necessarily appropriate to say that that is a tax the employer has to pay, but
I counted it as such. Transaction taxes, I counted as a "business tax". VAT, I
counted as individual taxation, mostly because it is regressive and hits the
poor, i.e. non business owners disproportionately.

So my earlier claim was incorrect. It is more of a 50-50 split.

[http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/taxation/data/revenue-
statistic...](http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/taxation/data/revenue-
statistics/netherlands_data-00247-en)

~~~
weddpros
"social security contributions.... tax the employer has to pay": that's a
great lie, that employers pay those, not employees.

For employers, it's one amount of money paid for hiring an employee: employers
don't really care what's salary, and what's taxes. In France, employees don't
even get 50% of their gross salary: there are more social security
contributions than salary.

Employees should really want to reduce social security contributions, instead
of thinking "my boss pays for it".

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nradov
Eliminate corporate income taxes, and make the change revenue neutral by
raising taxes on individual corporate investors and high-income employees. The
money eventually flows to them anyway. By eliminating corporate income tax we
could cut out all the waste and non-productive tax avoidance financial
engineering. We wouldn't need corporate tax accountants at all. This would
boost growth rates and economic efficiency.

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oakesm9
Wouldn't those high income employees just become tax exiles and move away?
That's what happens with athletes like Lewis Hamilton living in Monaco.

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nradov
It doesn't matter where they live. Foreign investors can still be required to
pay income and capital gains taxes on money earned in a particular country.
The government can always block or seize international payments to tax
evaders.

In theory the countries where Lewis Hamilton races and earns his income could
tax him there. But generally they let him slip through loopholes to maintain
good relations with F1.

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oriol16
So Lewis Hamilton needs to fill tax returns in the 40 countries he works in at
the end of the season

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woodpanel
To be fair: I'd expect Mr. Hamilton to be payed for his 40 races by exactly
one company which is based in one location, rather than for each race by one
of 40 companies.

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tomcooks
Half of which belongs to Italy[0], considering they evaded taxes for years.

[0]([https://www.wired.it/economia/business/2017/12/15/amazon-
acc...](https://www.wired.it/economia/business/2017/12/15/amazon-
accordo-100-milioni/))

~~~
riffraff
That is unrelated, the things contested to Luxemburg is that there was a
special agreement in place for Amazon, which is forbidden by EU regulations.

The thing contested from the Italian tax office is actual tax evasion.

Edit: to clarify, I mean that Luxemburg can have had illicit behaviour
independently from Amazon acting legally in Italy (which in theory they did
since 2015).

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wiz21c
JC Junker, current President of the Commission, was also Prime Minister of
Luxembourg just before... Is it me or does it sound just awful ?

~~~
blibble
the EU has a tendency to be where clapped out/disgraced national politicians
that are no longer electable in their home countries end up

it's a nice place to retire, and pays more than the national office too

there's peter mandelson, jean-claude juncker and guy verhofstadt, to name a
few

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Ftuuky
Durão Barroso too.

~~~
FRex
He was the President of the European Commission which requires approval of
European Parliament (elected directly) and European Council (the heads of
countries).

What the fuck is EU supposed to do with him? Throw him out and tell leaders
and directly elected MEPs from 20+ countries to shove it? And who exactly is
the EU in that case? Who and how could challenge these decisions while the
majority of actual people in Europe don't give enough of a shit about Barroso
and elect (if they even go to the elections..) these governments, heads of
state and MEPs that put him where he was?

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interdrift
Someone should just step up and review all of this mess.

