But will people travel to this tax haven to buy their computers? Will Apple's employees all move there to write software? Nope.
What we mean by Apple operating in (say) Germany is these things: they make sales there, and they have employees there.
Where the letterhead says they're incorporated... isn't this just an implementation detail? It's like asking where their datacenter is located. It's in the cloud, who cares? It seems to me that making the tax laws care about this is crazy... why do we this?
Why not simply tax the things which cannot move, transactions involving real people who live in particular places?
> Why not simply tax the things which cannot move, transactions involving real people who live in particular places?
that's already happening. Unless you're implying increasing consumption tax (VATS, GST etc), or higher income tax for individuals (payroll tax, capital gains tax etc).
The tax that's "missing" (read: dodged) is corporate income tax - which is a tax on the profits a corporation makes. But if you don't make any profits (read: hide profits using legal schemes), then what _do_ you tax?
To prevent tax-havens, you'd need to impose sanctions against doing business with any entity that is incorporated in said tax haven. But that's a nuclear option, which can cause damage beyond just stopping tax dodge (like harming the citizen of the tax-haven country, since they now cannot import food, for example).
We tax the money going from a human being into the corporation (VAT etc). And we tax the money coming out (Payroll etc).
The idea that we must tax the company's profits too (if they made any) is what seems strange to me. Because it depends then on defining which bit of a multinational made the profit, and there's no good way to do this. All it seems to do is encourage complicated schemes which the little guys can't afford. And I don't see the advantage over just taxing both ends of the pipe.
I know there are economists who disagree with me, and I don't understand their reasons. But all I'm seeing in the letter (and this thread) is personification, saying "the pipe must pay his share!" but the pipe isn't a person.
apple already pays huge amounts of taxes to germany. It just doesn’t pay large amounts of a specific tax called “income tax” because it isn’t based in Germany.
But "income tax" is a misleading name for this. It's a tax on corporate profits.
The letter wants you to compare this rate to _your_ rate of income tax and be shocked. But this is stupid, the corporation is not a human being.
For those profits to be enjoyed by anyone, they have to be paid out again as salary, or dividend, or recovered by selling shares... and these transactions are all taxed. And, of course, all of this money which is now profit was taxed when whoever bought the computer was charged VAT.
(Who signs the check to the tax man on each of these transactions is irrelevant, but another common way to mislead people for outrage. The tax man stands between you and Apple and demands VAT... and between Apple and their employee and demands income tax... how this is collected is, again, an implementation detail.)
What we mean by Apple operating in (say) Germany is these things: they make sales there, and they have employees there.
Where the letterhead says they're incorporated... isn't this just an implementation detail? It's like asking where their datacenter is located. It's in the cloud, who cares? It seems to me that making the tax laws care about this is crazy... why do we this?
Why not simply tax the things which cannot move, transactions involving real people who live in particular places?