[xgbi]

It is bad because it decorrelates the country you make a profit out of from the country you pay taxes on this profit.

The people paying for your product are able to buy it because they live in a country that provides for them, through added value, jobs, health care, infrastructure and so on. If you want to profit from these people's buying power, then you have to conform to that country's rules of business, that's all.

Apple is very happy to make huge sells of iPhones thoughout France, Germany, Italy and such countries, siphoning money from their people to Ireland, without ever contributing as much into the local economy. They employ a few hundred people in Apple stores and hotlines, but compared to their profit it is just ridiculous.

[pzh]

Is that really the case? Apple operates in Ireland and it pays taxes there based on a certain competitive rate it has. If Apple sells phones in certain countries, it has a network of suppliers there and it pays taxes on their business operations there. It seems that you're making the argument that the phones have to be produced in every country where they're sold in order to eliminate trade deficits (the so-called decorrelation of profits and taxes that would result from the importing of a product). But the only way for the other countries to get that tax revenue would be to be competitive enough (through competitive tax rates, availability of talent, infrastructure, legal system, etc.), so that Apple would be incentivized to open offices and move their R&D and pay taxes there. It seems you're arguing that these other countries shouldn't have to compete on these criteria, but should somehow be entitled to that tax revenue or at least to protectionist measures that would make sure that Apple has no incentive to go anywhere else, purely based on the fact that willing buyers purchase Apple's products there. I'm not sure that's a very strong argument because it basically amounts to saying that if you don't force Apple to give some form of a discount to these buyers, they won't be able to buy the product in the future...

[pjc50]

The thing about transfer pricing is that it makes the "location where value is created" completely arbitary. It's not where the R&D is done, it's where the shell company that holds the patents is registered.

Apple subsidiaries in random countries selling phones don't pay taxes because they don't make any profit. They don't make any profit because they're "charged" an amount for the phones (and IP, branding etc) that exactly equals the sales.

[weddpros]

"decorrelates the country you make a profit out of from the country you pay taxes on this profit": taxes are due where value creation took place. That's called a rule. The EU decided the rule should be changed after the fact, retroactively.

"people paying for your product are able to buy it because they live in a country that provides for them": wow... really? I know governments love considering people's money as theirs, people's lives as theirs, but that's a bit far stretched maybe? I'm not any country's liability. I'm a free man in a free society. Aren't you?

[webXL]

"Without the Glorious State, you wouldn't have had any consumers to make you wealthy!"

Here's a business producing commerce-enabling technology in an extremely valuable manner, hence the profit. Consumers exchanged their earned, post-tax savings for those things and paid additional tax along the way. To act like governments were short-changed is preposterous. It's "you didn't build that" taken to the extreme, and borderline extortion.