Ireland likely to face censure over Apple tax (EUSSR attacks)

Irish Times ^ | Tue, Sep 8, 2015, 13:07

[Olog-hai]

Ireland will probably face censure from European authorities within months in relation to its tax dealings with Apple, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

A finding against Ireland will spark a legal battle that may last years, as the government is ready to fight the decision in the European Union Court of Justice, it’s understood.

In preliminary findings last year, European antitrust authorities said Apple’s tax arrangements were improperly designed to give the iPhone maker a financial boost in exchange for jobs in the country. Apple said in 2013 it had paid an effective tax rate of less than 2 percent in Ireland over the previous 10 years. …

[nathanbedford]

Note the bias set up in the European Union scheme, nations are compelled to finance themselves with taxes rather than with growth.

If Ireland can attract businesses which generates jobs by cutting taxes, then why not Poland, one of the few countries in the European Union that even recognizes the scent of capitalism when it wafts by them? If Poland and other nations can cut taxes to generate jobs, the socialists running the European Union see this is a race to the bottom. Reaganite conservatives, supply-siders, would see that as progress on the march toward prosperity.

The European Union socialists want to divide up the pie but free marketeers, Reaganites, conservatives want to make the pie bigger.

[RockyTx]

Apple is so big, that it can negotiate
its own tax rate with countries..

the deal for Ireland is,
give Apple a rate of 2%,
or they go elsewhere.

who thinks that is fair?

[Olog-hai]

The (European) Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It shall promote scientific and technological advance. …

— Consolidated Treaty of Lisbon, “Treaty on European Union”, Article 3, Section 3, Subsection 1

Another bizarre descendant of the Stalin constitution of 1936, this via the UN Charter in part. Note that the “internal market” is to be set up from the top rather than by free market forces.

[Swordmaker]

the deal for Ireland is, give Apple a rate of 2%, or they go elsewhere

It the capital gains taxes for corporation on money held there on interest earned. It's not Income Taxes for sales earned in other countries. . . Apple has already PAID the income taxes where they made the sales. Apple is allowed under EU and other national rules to move gains to Ireland after they've paid taxes on their earnings where they earned it. Only the U.S. prohibits such transfers without retaxing it as Income again! Get it through your heads this is POST TAX RETAINED EARNINGS money that other nations want to be able to tax again!

[Swordmaker]

who thinks that is fair?

In the U.S. Apple's income Taxes were the most of any U.S. Corporation, accounting op for one out of every forty dollars of US Corporate Income Tax collected! In the last tax year, Apple's effective Income Tax Rate was 29.6%. That's nothing to sneeze at. . . it is certainly NOT 2%.

[Swordmaker]

The socialist tax and spenders in Europe are not happy with their own tax laws and are wanting to punish Apple for using them to legally minimize their Capital Gains taxes by legally transferring their post income tax retained earning to Ireland where the Capital Gains tax rate is a mere 2% on those invested gains. EU Nations with higher capital Gains taxes are calling foul, claiming Apple should have left those earning where they were earned and invested them from their jurisdiction so THEY could tax them at their much higher rates! After all, they reason, they need Apple's money! So they want to beat up on Ireland for not beating up Apple and other high tech firms who invest from Ireland. — PING!

Apple has too much money,
so let's take it!
Ping!

The Latest Apple/Mac/iOS Pings can be found by searching Keyword “ApplePingList” on Freerepublic’s Search.

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[nathanbedford]

highly competitive social market economy,

Such a construct is on its face oxymoronic.

Worse, as you point out, the market is to be structured from top-down and the top does not bear analysis from a Democratic point of view. So you have a top-down economy dictated by elitists who are not responsible to the people, undertaking to create a "free market" which is a "social" market and explicitly limited in its freedom by protection of the environment.

Since all of these ill-defined conditions are to be interpreted by the very people who are to create the market, we have no representative democracy, no actual free market, we have rule by elites.

Small wonder, they cannot tolerate Ireland reducing taxes.

[Olog-hai]

The EU’s gone after Ireland over corporate tax rates before. They want Ireland to “harmonize” at 25 percent or so when the Emerald Isle is typically far lower. That will slaughter any advantage Ireland possesses and send them back to the pre-1990s economic funk.

[Gen.Blather]

“who thinks that is fair?”

I worked for a company that negotiated a free 100,000 square foot building paid for by taxpayers in exchange for hiring 250 welfare recipients as employees. (Boy, they were happy good quality workers./s) Companies negotiate tax deals every day. What do you think brings California companies to states like Texas?

Taxes are only for the little people.

Chief Justice John Marshall said, “the power to tax is the power to destroy.”

If you want the economy to boom, do away with taxes and, of necessity, trim down our bloated government. Do we really need a federal, state, county and city EPA? (That’s just one local example. There are too many to list.)

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

who thinks that is fair?

Apple. And its shareholders.

Who thinks it is unfair? People who didn’t lift a finger to create Apple products, but presume to critique those who did.

From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sarbonne:

There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

[Lurker]

I do.

L

[jurroppi1]

This happens with all of the med device makers too (I work for one of them). We provide jobs, we get a cut-rate tax scheme.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

highly competitive social market economy

Such a construct is on its face oxymoronic.

As Thomas Sowell once put it, when people use the word “social” as a modifier, it actually negates what it modifies. “Social justice” is injustice, and a “highly competitive social market economy” is, as you suggest, governmental cronyism.

A larger issue is that the term “society” generally has been hijacked, and the effort to do so not only is not new, it was already recognizable in 1776:

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil . . . - Thomas Paine, Common Sense

I, Pencil is an article written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read, the burden of which is that not only does the government not provide society with pencils, no company and certainly no individual can do it, either. For that, society wants people to mine graphite - using machinery which society wanted someone else to design and construct - and so on for the wood, the enamel, the ferule which hold the eraser, the eraser. Not only so, but the people who do all those jobs require food, water, clothing, shelter, and so forth.

The bottom line is that society makes the pencil. It is the grossest of distortions to conflate “society” with government. “Society,” as I have shown, is a perfectly serviceable word for “conservatives” - but it is coopted by people who actually despise the individual components of society and desire to rule them. So, “conservatives” never use the word as they should - and we check our wallets when anyone else uses it.

To make an even larger point, the example of “society” vs. “government” is not the only such case. “Liberal” is another classic. If you read The Road to Serfdom (Reader’’s Digest Condensed Version here), you will see that FA Hayek used the term “liberal” to denote people who today would be called “conservatives” in America. That is because Hayek, an Austrian, learned English in America before the meaning of “liberal” was essentially inverted, according to Safire's New Political Dictionary, in the 1920s. And the meaning of “liberal” was not changed in Britain, where Hayek wrote Serfdom during WWII.

The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us.

And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation - we know that just as surely as we know that every American marketer loves to boldly proclaim that whatever product he is flogging is NEW! A belief in progress is the planted axiom of the American “Great Experiment;” in the Constitution it is explicit in the explicit grant of authority to Congress

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .

There is a systematic thrust of our publicity Establishment toward a Newspeak version of English in which all good words are pro-socialist, and all bad words are anti-socialist.

[nathanbedford]

Such a construct is on its face oxymoronic.

I can't believe I said that, all oxymorons are facially so by definition.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the ping; posts; thread. “...we have no representative democracy, no actual free market, we have rule by elites.” BUMP!

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

;-)

[E.G.C.]

BTTT