[oliwarner]

Because it's not just internal.

The EU allows for free cross boarder trade and movement of assets within the EU. Having a lower corporate tax rate in one country means businesses operating in the EU put their revenue through there. It's an automatic incentive.

There are rules here because otherwise it would be a race to the bottom. Each country wants Amazon, Google, etc for their employees' income tax.

The whole EU loses out from one state giving multinationals preferential treatment.

[logifail]

>> Having a lower corporate tax rate in one country means businesses operating in the EU put their revenue through there

I'm not sure this is true any more, at least not everywhere

"Amazon has become the first technology company to abandon controversial corporate structures that divert sales and profits away from UK in the face of a clampdown imposed by George Osborne.

From the start of [May 2015] the online retailer has started booking its sales through the UK, meaning resulting profits will be taxed by HMRC [the UK tax authority]. The group made $8.3bn (£5.3bn) of worldwide sales from British online shoppers but for 11 years all these internet transactions have been booked in Luxembourg."

source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/23/amazon-to...

[oliwarner]

Amazon and Apple have both been bitten by EU states offering illegally disproportionate "deals" to individual companies. These were deemed to be state aid by the EU and each member state (Luxembourg and Ireland respectively) were required to charge back-tax to correct the tax situations.

But there are still lower tax areas. This is still an issue that is not simple to unravel because flat tax was not a founding part of the EU, something we figured out after the fact.

Amazon, Ebay, and Google all put the vast majority of their earnings through secondary states within the EU, not the main markets. I'm not sure what Apple do these days, but they've just paid a couple of ~£200m in extra tax found from an audit. The others "claim" they are going to rectify this, but it's all face-saving. They're all lying tax cheats.

[oliwarner]

I meant to also point out that they said this in 2015 but from my reading of my invoices, and their various Companies House filings, Amazon EU Sarl is still the entity trading in the UK.

Their UK businesses are tiny. Warehousing and marketing.

[nradov]

Then let's have a race to the bottom.

Some people seem to assume that high corporate income tax rates are a good thing, but there's really no proof of that. We would all be better off if every country eliminated corporate income taxes entirely, and made the change revenue neutral by increasing taxes on high income investors and employees. This would encourage economic growth by eliminating resources wasted on tax accounting and avoidance.

[oliwarner]

Urgh, No?

Zero Corporation Tax allows multinationals to make huge profits and just chuck the money back home, even if that's outside the Union. Yeah, they're probably paying tax on it somewhere, but it's not taxed in the place it was earned. That's the problem here. Countries are losing cash and tax revenue to this.

Your trickle-down economics is similarly unproven.

[tomatocracy]

I think the idea is that governments should tax things which aren’t as mobile (personal incomes, land, consumption etc) in order to minimise the distorting effects on the market tax can otherwise have. There are positives and negatives to that but it’s not totally obviously bad.

[vkou]

When most of your income comes from being an owner, as opposed to a worker, your 'personal income' is incredibly mobile.