Lame. EU is overreaching here. Our tax policy is none of their business: every single referendum on the EU the pro-EU side make it clear that EU won't have power over our tax policy, yet this is what we see.
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If I have to pay 45% for what little I make, they should be paying more than 0.0005%.
The tax policy is the EU's business because there is 1 market.
I don't care if the Irish government decides not to tax the revenue from the Irish apple stores, it's their business. But if the Irish government abuses the '1 market' principle from the EU, then it's their business to do something about the abuse.
These big American companies are not only playing out the EU members against each other, they are also competing unfair against local business so the chance is smaller that the 'new apple' is a European company.
It's not abuse to make our own decisions about what we choose to tax. This is a matter of sovereignty. We were never supposed to be giving away such power.
That's the brexit discussion. If you leave the EU and the common market, then you can make this decision. As long as you are a member, you can't.
You enjoy the upside of being member of 1 market with 100's of millions of potential customers so you have to take the responsibilities that come with that.
And be realistic, if you see the amount of money mentioned in this case, you have to realize it's bigger then just Ireland. Or you have to have apple stores on every street corner and even then...
We never agreed that as part of common market. We had referendums including on entry to common market. Over and over we were told that common market did not mean common tax policy, and that we'd have a veto in the council on any attempt to bring common tax policy in. The people of Ireland are sovereign in Ireland; it's not acceptable to tell us we must abide by something we did not agree to or we must leave. Tax policy has long been a national issue and this is an attempt at harmonisation.
It is abuse that a US company decides to take advantage of that to avoid paying taxes when we all get porked over and struggle.
The fact that you're abused by high taxes doesn't make it right to abuse others with high taxes either. It would be better if we could all avoid taxes like Apple does.
It would be nice if money grew on trees as well.