Poland presses ahead with 3 percent digital tax despite Trump threat
(www.politico.eu)
from sqgl@sh.itjust.works to technology@lemmy.world on 26 Aug 18:10
https://sh.itjust.works/post/44853771
from sqgl@sh.itjust.works to technology@lemmy.world on 26 Aug 18:10
https://sh.itjust.works/post/44853771
3% may not sound much but this is on revenue, not profit.
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Might be hard to do, it needs to be approved by president of Poland which is a big fan of Trump (contrary to current government)
The current president is vetoing every law he can
Surprising no one.
This one deserves vetoing.
This just sounds like higher VAT on large tech companies? Isn’t it a regressive tax?
Generally (for most countries that do this, I haven’t researched Poland) the point is that traditional (non-digital) companies have always paid import duties, usually much higher than 3%, when goods are physically imported. Digital goods by their nature have effectively been skirting the system for a few decades and paying zero tax, and it’s not good for local businesses to be in a situation where they’re paying a bunch of taxes locally but foreign businesses competing in the same market get to just skip it.
The $750M requirement is likely because the amount of paperwork required for a small business to correctly calculate, process and pay that tax would be prohibitively expensive for them to sell their service to Polish customers, and they don’t want a situation where small businesses just straight up refuse to sell in Poland.
Exactly this. The whole premise of the tax system is based around the historically correct idea that you need to physically move goods in order to sell them, or physically be somewhere to sell services.
Companies like google are making buckets of money all over the world, and don’t need to tax a dime most places, because they have no physical presence there. This makes it pretty much impossible to compete with the international behemoths, because they have access to a munch of tax-free revenue, while a startup will typically be centred around wherever they’re based, where they also need to pay taxes.
Not to mention that they say they don’t have to abide by local laws because they aren’t located there.
I thought he loved Three Percenters
Paging r/polandball
Can you poke Canada with a stick now?
For me the brass-neckedness of this is that as soon as it comes to tax, all the big “U.S.” companies are actually Irish, Bermudan and Caymanian companies.
They have more balls than Canada. Pokes Carney with a stick.
When US DNS servers (and Cloudflare) turn off access to and from Poland, I'll be interested. Until then, the digital taxes are interesting but empty threats as far as the corps are concerned.
So they are trying to substitute company profit tax? I just checked with Google and they include VAT on subscription so it doesn’t seem the case that there is no tax.
Wait, how does this work? I am for the EU to retaliate with tariffs against the US, but how is Poland able to do it by itself? Isn’t the EU supposed to have a common trade policy?
Well… Taxes are not unified, trade policy is supposed to be. So this is kinda gray area as it is a tax affecting trade specifically. But VAT kinda gives the precedence that countries can tax foreign company business.
Yeah but my understanding was that an important part of the EU is the negotiation of trade deals that regulate tariffs, and that the countries more or less gave their sovereignty in that area to the EU. Maybe I was mistaken?
Again, what is the difference between a tariff and a tax? Tariffs don’t apply to domestic companies, while taxes do. EU controls tarrifs, but not taxes. This tax technically applies to all companies, domestic or foreign above certain revenue, although in reality, there are no domestic companies it would affect.
So it is a tax, not a tariff by a technicality. It may even be the case that a court will strike this law down, saying they can’t pretend it is a tax when it is clearly meant to tax only foreign tech giants.