Which really shouldn't be surprising: if a business is not adding value, it's not a viable business. But if a business is adding value on net, it should indeed owe tax charged on net value added.
You're right, it's not surprising at all. It's a tax meant to make revenue for the government. But all my life I've heard from people (who have never had a business), that businesses get back all their VAT. It doesn't help showing them the accounting, which very clearly shows VAT paid and VAT deducted.
It's a misconception that is on the level of people believing that their progressive tax rates are applied back towards previous salaries or business owners who think you should increase prices for the customers you have to make up for the customers you lost.
It’s not really a tax on their profits. Consumers have to pay it on top of the net sales price, and they know that it won’t add to the company‘s bottom line. The money goes to the state every month (or quarter sometimes), deducted by the VAT the business itself already paid for services/products.
For accounting purposes, VAT is a totally separate cycle of money, and for every important financial metric, VAT is ignored. [Removed] If you happen to spend more VAT than you collect, you’ll get the negative back from the state. Also, the net price is always known because it must be shown on every invoice.
On a product of 120€ with 70€ wages, they pay 20€ VAT on the 100€-before-tax, and they pay 25% IS (corporate tax) on the 30€ margin, so 7.5€ (this example is for France). If they distribute the remaining 22.5€ as dividends, the recipients pay up to 30% IR, so 7€.
VAT is most of the tax revenue by far. France’s budget is made of 50% VAT, 15% from corporate tax (IS), 10% from income tax (IR) and then the rest from various state revenue (like renting the palaces for movies).
I don't know the initial incentives, but VAT is much harder to evade (businesses have to keep track/declare things if they want to reclaim the VAT they paid).
Also it's a consumption tax, in the end the end consumer is the one paying it (through higher price). The businesses in the middle are mainly collecting the tax on behalf of the state.
I mean, what's the rationale in the US for a business being taxed on their profits, and also having to pass along the sales tax they've collected?
It's just two forms of taxation. Sales tax/VAT is a fixed proportion of sales, and then you also pay tax on profit that's left.
You might as well ask why people pay income tax when they make money and then have to pay sales tax/VAT again when they spend it!
Of course, answering that is complicated, and there are a lot of factors. But the main one is basically that governments like to tax "everything", so that people/goods/services that might wind up evading one tax wind up paying another. Sales tax makes sure governments get revenue even when businesses make no profit, taxing profits makes sure governments get more revenue when businesses make more money.
1. They need to tax every economic transaction possible to maintain demand for the Euro currency and keep it from loosing its value. This is the most important reason.
2. To get more money in taxes for the government. There's people who argue that lower tax rates increases economic activity and in the end would increase tax revenue also for the government. The government doesn't see things that way. "You pay me now, pay more!"
3. Taxes on profits are an incentive for business owners to reinvest any surplus into growing their business, meaning more jobs etc.
The candidate “solution” to that problem is to remove any representation requirements in medical trials, so adverse effects that manifest just in specific subgroups aren’t found. I wish I were joking.
I want an actual-full-screen, with menu-bar and Dock invisible, with no window chrome - not merely “fill the maximum allowable space by the OS, as if dragging the windows corner with mouse”.
BUT I don’t want to use the native affordance for that, since that makes it its own “Desktop”, and I can no longer switch to it using my Snow Leopard-era muscle memory of using ^-<number> to switch between them.
I am fully aware that this is incredibly niche requirement, but it is a dealbreaker for me :)
I saw that Ghostty kinda supports this; but then disables tab support if this is enabled, which, also an obvious dealbreaker.
It’s growing into a similar problem as faced by nations with an inverted population pyramid and no immigration: an increasingly smaller share of workers whose productivity supports an increasingly large proportion of the economically idle.
But it happens much faster because rather than being economically idle due to having worked and contributed to society for 40-some years like those nations’ retiree seniors, Haredim move smoothly from being children drawing on societal resources to being adults drawing on societal resources with no period of usefulness in the middle. By analogy, they’re the peacock feathers of Israeli society, and how things get resolved with that will get … interesting.
Ramanujan himself survived childhood smallpox and died at just 32 from what's thought to be complications from an earlier bout with dysentery. But he had lucked out in that he was born male in an urban setting in a high caste, with access to education, textbooks, and the language of the imperial core, and managed to make it to adulthood at all.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
If we individual makeup was so irrelevant we wouldn't have just had me Ramanujan so far. Although I agree that Einstein is probably very unremarkable and was mostly the right (genius) person in the right place at the right time in history of science to marry together things other people figured out and sprinkle some unique framing onto that.
It's not that individual makeup is so irrelevant, it's that if we assume (potential) Einsteins and Ramanujans follow a normal distribution (or really any random distribution), then the fact that so many people in the world live in situations where any genius will simply never be noticed means we are necessarily missing out on the vast majority of them.
Checklists have been demonstrated to improve care quality because when it's the not-so-nice nurse that's on shift, and the doctor's been awake for 60 hours straight, the stuff that's on the checklist still gets done.
The opposite of shorting is just buying the stock: exchange the market price $X for a share of stock today, sell later for $Y, profit or loss is $Y - $X. You've made money if the stock has gone UP. Since there's no upper bound on the price of a share but the lower bound is $0, you can lose at most your initial outlay $X, but potential gains are uncapped.
Shorting a stock is borrowing the stock: that is, you get a share of stock today (and sell it today for market price $X) but are liable for returning the share of stock at some time in the future (you obtain it from the market at $Y to do so). The profit or loss is thus $X - $Y. Since there's no upper bound on the price of a share but the lower bound is $0, you can gain at most your initial outlay $X if the price goes to zero, but potential losses are uncapped.
> In short, Go is not just a programming language. Of course it is a programming language, that's its definition, but its purpose was to help provide a better way to develop high-quality software, at least compared to our environment 14 plus years ago.
> And that's still what it's about today. Go is a project to make building production software easier and more productive.
I think there is an idea that Go is "software engineering for the masses", and that's why the word "easier" is used, and not "simpler". "easier" is fine when you're starting out and you don't know what you don't know. As times goes on, you start understanding more because you have more experience, and so you may yearn for something simpler, with less abstractions, more control. Go isn't the best language for this, but it's also far from the worst.
Yeah, he did it all for the immense personal gains of … getting poisoned, imprisoned, and dying in an Arctic prison colony before reaching 50.
Navalny being a Russian chauvinist should be utterly unsurprising: it would be significantly stranger for Russian opposition to be a stereotypical '60s hippie as opposed to, you know, Russian.
Personal gains as in hoping to become the next dictator - he gambled and lost. Nothing more, nothing less. As I said, I don't believe anyone in russia wants to change the system on either political level or social level. From what I can see, (almost) everyone strives for this lifestyle. It's only a question of who comes out on top.
