Good. I don't understand why companies need to be bribed to come to markets. Want to sell your goods, great, pay the same taxes every other company pays. This is nothing more than government subsidies for specific private companies.
It might actually be a good thing for the taxpayers of that country when looked at narrowly, which is often why these deals are done, but if every EU nation does it to their neighbour then overall it's a classic case of "race to the bottom" and taxpayers all across the EU will lose out.
> It might actually be a good thing for the taxpayers of that country when looked at narrowly, which is often why these deals are done, but if every EU nation does it to their neighbour then overall it's a classic case of "race to the bottom" and taxpayers all across the EU will lose out.
The problem is that countries refusing to compete with each other doesn't actually help all of them. Countries like Germany have strong infrastructure, high availability of qualified labor, etc. If Romania had the same taxes as Germany then who would expand into Romania?
And of course taking taxes off the table would just shift the issue to spending. If you required countries to have a uniform (presumably high) tax rate then they could just spend the money on things that encourage companies to expand there and you're right back to the same situation.
Countries compete with each other to attract capital. The only way to stop that is to prevent the movement of capital across national borders, which is a completely unrealistic bad idea.
To answer your question, everyone interested in paying much lower salaries to their workforce may decide to locate a factory in Romania. Market size, cost of operation, infrastructure, neighboring markets, and many more factors play an important role in such decisions.
Taxes are far from being the most meaningful factor, and governments dumb enough to offer such deals are acting disgracefully towards both their tax-paying citizenry and their EU partners who don't engage in this race to the bottom.
> To answer your question, everyone interested in paying much lower salaries to their workforce may decide to locate a factory in Romania. Market size, cost of operation, infrastructure, neighboring markets, and many more factors play an important role in such decisions.
Of course there are many factors that go into it. What matters is how the country stacks up on balance.
Countries that stack up unfavorably have no financial capacity to address their shortcomings because you can't build infrastructure or education with no money and governments can't collect money with no tax base. What they can do is lower taxes to attract investment so they can get 5% of something instead of 30% of nothing.
Their primary alternative for attracting investment is to abandon safety and environmental regulations, which is not better.
Specially when companies play the game "trick the government", like e.g. Nokia.
They moved their plant from Germany to Romania, got the "Company of the Year" award from the Romanian government and about two years later moved the factory again to an Asian country.
In the process they got two angry governments and now they are as they are.
They didn't really "move" plants around; they were expanding production on different markets to meet needs on these countries and continents, and also withdrawing manufacturing in some places (the big mistake in Germany, I understand, was the purchase and attempted conversion of an old television factory in Bochum).
While I don't fully understand the case with the Romanian plant and why it was shut down so soon, what Nokia is now has little to do with their plant management strategy (except that I think it was efficient as long as plants were needed) and everything to do with senior management's product decisions (not production management).
(FWIW, Nokia is currently a profitable company, just not in the phone terminal business.)
> They didn't really "move" plants around; they were expanding production on different markets to meet needs on these countries and continents, and also withdrawing manufacturing in some places
Ah, the tactical decisions. "We're not retreating, we're just advancing in a different direction."
Indeed. For another example, the trade union of horse carriage drivers for People's Co-Op Stores in Finland (Elanto) is still on strike (which started in 1930 and never ended). They just moved on to advance in a different direction (i.e. started driving lorries, and the union eventually merged/became part of the local "teamsters" union).
There were no angry governments, that is just your sour grapes about the globalization. Finland lost production to Germany, Germany to Romania, and Romania to Asia, and blaming a single company is quite naive.
Nokia's downfall was due to software issues, and certainly had nothing to do with improved efficiency thanks to production optimization.
By their own governments I assume.
If you want to do an experimental check: just try to not pay taxes for a while, and you'll find yourself at the wrong end of a govt. gun eventually.
Which itself was held at gunpoint by Moloch[0]. That's how it works - everyone has to play and lose because those who don't play lose first to those who do.
An example I can think of offhand is AMD (now Global Foundaries) choosing to locate one of their new fabs in Dresden after being offered lucrative tax benefits by the German government.
AMD got to save money on the fab, Germany got long term economic investment in the former east. It was pretty much a win-win deal.
Incentives are generally designed to attract inward investment and job creation, rather than to persuade companies to sell into the market (i.e. please set up your factory/European HQ here, regardless of where you're actually going to sell most of your goods)
I've seen cities near to me get burned by this. There was a water bottling plant that got a lot of subsidies and tax breaks from a nearby city believing that it would create a lot of jobs for locals.
Turns out you don't need very many people to run a water bottling facility of this nature and most of it is automated.
I've heard similar for data centers. Huge tax breaks believing they'll bring in a lot of jobs. People in town train hoping to be employed. Maybe 50-100 people actually required.
Places need to do a better job researching how much job creation is actually going to come out of this tax breaks and subsidies.
Why should factory or headquarters be where the goods are sold? The whole point of EU is free movement of capital, goods and manpower. Farms are where there is fields, sun and irrigation; factories are where there is raw material, logistics and energy; headquarter functions are where there is capability to handle legal and financial questions. Goods and services are sold where there is customers.
This is the very point of EU, so if we don't want that to happen, isn't the most logical step to disband EU immediately?
Historical processes take their time. The old ways of working in Europe don't solve these taxation issues either, on the contrary. So let's move forward instead of backwards!
It makes no sense to scrap the only hope for shaping Europe in a consensual and constructive way just because it isn't perfect yet. Otherwise it's national interests against national interests once again.
There's still Federal taxes which get paid, and distributed out to the states. Whereas there is no "EU" tax that gets distributed to the member states.
EU levies "EU taxes" to its member countries and then distributes part of the money back. It doesn't collect these taxes directly from EU citizens, but that doesn't mean the tax incidence wouldn't be on citizens.
EU collects about 0.3 % of VAT revenue of each country, and about 0.7 % of GDB of each country as a membership fee (which is the largest source of income).
EU also keeps most of the import duties levied on non-EU products.
The US is worse of in this regard. The EU has rules about state aid that the US doesn't. In the US, states give enormous tax breaks to companies to set up a factory in their state. In the EU that sort of thing is illegal.
The EU is in the strange semi-state - in some ways united, in others still a set of separate nations. This ain't different than the states in the US - they compete for private investments too.
Exactly. And since many countries compete for a corporation to set up business on their soil, there's a race to the bottom of tax exemptions and other concessions.
I have no problem if an area is trying to land a major contributor to the area in jobs and future revenues. Giving tax breaks to get such tend to pay back in that you get support businesses cropping up to support the original beneficiary.
These deals however just don't appear to provide any benefit to the areas affected, only to the companies. Is there a big pool of political contributions in countries like these? Do they have the equivalent of PACs and such?
> I have no problem if an area is trying to land a major contributor to the area in jobs and future revenues. Giving tax breaks to get such tend to pay back in that you get support businesses cropping up to support the original beneficiary.
That's not really the issue. The issue is that these were tax deals done behind closed doors between government and businesses rather than the government creating a tax policy for all that is transparent and applied uniformly and fairly to all businesses, they created a tax policy for all except a handful of companies that could get private deals.
And that usually leads to bad results after a while. Yes it makes sense to have tax policy that treats different businesses differently. And it makes sense for there to be some flexibility and to be able to negotiate on certain things in a transparent and fair manner (e.g. a business 'negotiating' over whether it applies for a sustainable energy tax benefit if it invests in a new green energy tech that happened to fall outside of the parameters of the sustainable energy programme the government created a few years ago when said tech didn't exist, there's some flexibility there to expand the programme for that particular company that makes sense. Such a negotiation fits with the aim of the tax programme, is transparent and will affect everyone equally who applies for it afterwards).
But simply negotiating some special tax rate just for you that doesn't apply to anyone else, in a backroom deal that isn't officially known to anyone else, that's shady and corrupt, the kind of practices you expect from poor countries struggling with institutional development.
How you actually spend the money (e.g. to improve the area affected) is another topic altogether. But in its first principle these tax deals made no sense.
I suspect most of the time there are no major competing local businesses -- e.g. I don't see what Dutch businesses would directly lose from Starbucks moving their headquarters there; most likely, there will be gains in local supporting industries.
>> I don't see what Dutch businesses would directly lose from Starbucks moving their headquarters there
If there is a favourable tax agreement for Starbucks in the Netherlands as a result, then there is no longer a level playing field between Starbucks coffee shops and others.
All tax breaks are state aid, which is generally not allowed in the EU. As to why they do it, well they still get more tax than they would if the country wasnt there, even if it is very little. Probably some other benefits too.
The deals are only a half of the equation. The other half is that there are multiple countries competing for the same business to be located on their soil. Companies are incentivized to set up in a country willing to give the most concessions.
Modern business only hires profiles that are in short supply already. So, they went to The Netherlands to exacerbate the shortages of skilled labour while doing nothing for the insufficiently skilled unemployed ones. "Jobs" are never a valid motivation to do anything, because the ones who don't have them, will never have them.
Just for the record, the Netherlands has been proudly advertising their tax deals for years.
See this presentation[1], slide 12. Right from the horses mouth:
Reason 7 [to have a holding company in Holland]:
Fiscal climate: Very competitive tax climate from
its far-reaching tax treaty network to the
possibility to conclude socalled[sic] advance
tax rulings.
Utterly blatant. And notice the logo of Starbucks next to it. The Dutch government advertises that Starbucks pays practically nothing in tax, in order to undercut other EU countries.
These tax deals usually take the form of a fixed tax guarantee: the company agrees to place their holding company in the Netherlands and pay X euros in tax for the next N years (2 to 5), regardless of their actual revenue or profit. For the Dutch government this is just free tax revenue and if they don't make a sweetheart deal with the multinational the holding company would end up in Luxembourg or Ireland instead. This way the multinational can make the countries fight for the most preposterously low offer.
Starbucks also promised to create jobs in the Netherlands by locating their European coffee bean processing plant there. Extra jobs and tax revenue sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
After N years and M thousands of jobs created, MamaCorp decides that performing some production process in PoorCountry is much cheaper, so it decides to leave... unless VeryLowTaxCountry keeps the taxes very low. At that point, it's not anymore such a good deal (if you're HSBC, you even get a free pass for doing any crime you prefer, without going to jail).
This, not taking into account, let's say, that MamaCorp sets up a subsidiary in VeryHighTaxCountry, with very high profits. That profits though, are entirely funneled to the shell company in VeryLowTaxCountry, so that it pays no taxes in VeryHighTaxCountry and little taxes in VeryLowTaxCountry.
I'm mixing concepts here, but let's not forget that MamaCorps have a huge leverage because of their capitals, and because of their creative accounting strategies too, so deals like this need to be analyzed with extreme care and doubt.
Just throwing this out there with no idea of the reality of it, but maybe it is a good thing to have some downward pressure on tax rates from large multinationals because without that it could end up just being a 'race to the top' with countries continually ratcheting up rates unchecked.
What's more common is that the large multinationals get a targeted carve-out only usable by large multinationals, with the tax burden shifted to individuals and small businesses. A small business cannot practically take advantage of arrangements like "double Irish with a Dutch sandwich".
The corporate tax rate is not as important because taxes will still be paid on payroll and other uses of the money. The effective tax rate is not going to change much as the corporate tax rate changes because so much of the companies expenses are going to payroll and bonuses.
The goal of corporate taxes is to collect revenue from profits when a foreign entity own the company. Taxing people only works when the owners live in your country. Worse, high personal tax rates can encourage wealthy people to leave your country either on paper or directly.
PS: If your corporate tax rate is zero, then your country is often better off discouraging foreign investment.
In the UK at least, you can use umbrella trusts to legally dodge corporate tax as a small/medium business or self-employed if you're earning a decent amount.
That's tax avoidance, HMRC will come knocking and you'll end up having to pay 5 years tax in one chunk. Oh, plus penalties for not declaring you were avoiding tax!
Here is the HMRC specifically warning against this exact scheme and telling you they will tax all your money later and fine you:
Exactly! I don't know about you, but I think some competition among governments is a good thing. Why shouldn't the most efficient gov't reap all the rewards?
There is no reason to believe governments taking part in these races to the bottom are more efficient. (I would actually expect them to be more corrupt, on the average, as dictatorships are probably over-represented.)
The main problem with this sort of "competition" is these tax breaks for big companies creates a very unfair competition for small companies, which doesn't operate on the required scale to profit from them.
What rewards are they reaping? They're not necessarily getting more jobs, they're not getting more tax revenue, and as soon as the "efficient" government's tax break is over, the company will jump to the next country, and the original one will likely be worse off.
That's a BS argument. Starbucks will open restaurants there anyway because they want to sell coffee and make money. And if they don't, and there's demand, other coffee shops will.
IMO tax breaks like these are completely backwards most of the time. A huge corporation like Starbucks has entire departments dedicated to doing their taxes and finding loop holes to save money. The last thing they need is to pay less tax to begin with. If anybody is going to get a break, it should be small business owners.
The one place tax break incentives make sense are for large, one off things like a big manufacturing plant, where there will only be one (or just a few) of them, and getting it in your country or state is a big win. But there's really no reason I can see to incentive putting coffee shops on every other corner.
They also reduce jobs and the quality of those jobs whenever they win a big contract to serve as a cafeteria for some big venue as has recently happened in my city.
If a country was trying to adopt this, another issue would be the existing tax base that would be lost to lower rates. So you would have to make it up with many more companies - maybe possible, maybe not for a long time.
Has anyone ever done a study on how well these deals work out? I know in the US, there have been studies on whether or not the tax breaks for the film industry are worth it, and they almost never are. As soon as the tax break ends, they move filming somewhere else.
In 100 years we're going to look back and realize what a waste of time and effort corporate income taxes are. And what amount of time was wasted trying to levy and avoid them.
In the end, you can recover the same money by taxing dividends and income accordingly, and it's far more difficult to hide those (a person's residency is less ambiguous than a corporation; and while you can try to play games, with proper enforcement you will end up in jail for doing it).
Of course any politician will get castigated for suggesting removing the tax entirely, but that's just politics and not sound economic policy.
The problem is that you remove corporation tax and next thing you know, everybody has a personal "corporation" owning all his belonging, totally untaxed. Something most people do already, btw, because corporation taxes are usually much lower than income ones.
> a person's residency is less ambiguous than a corporation
Lol, the opposite is actually true. A corporation is required to have a legal address, without which it simply doesn't exist; a person can have "no fixed abode" and still exist just fine. In fact, a favourite tax-dodging trick is to be officially registered as living on a boat, or not spending more than a certain amount of time in any country.
> with proper enforcement you will end up in jail for doing it
That's very unlikely, when you directly or indirectly influence most people making the rules... which you always do, if you're rich, regardless of age or country.
> The problem is that you remove corporation tax and next thing you know, everybody has a personal "corporation" owning all his belonging, totally untaxed.
Property tax is independent of corporate income tax. Moreover, putting income-generating assets in the hands of a corporation to avoid personal income tax is what happens today (the corporation is just incorporated overseas), so no change there.
> Lol, the opposite is actually true. A corporation is required to have a legal address, without which it simply doesn't exist
He's using the wrong word. It isn't that a corporation's address is ambiguous, it's that it's arbitrary. You can incorporate your business in whichever jurisdiction has the most favorable taxes. You can't file your personal taxes there unless you actually live and have citizenship there.
> In fact, a favourite tax-dodging trick is to be officially registered as living on a boat, or not spending more than a certain amount of time in any country.
Which is clearly illegal unless you actually do. And I don't think that works in the US since US personal income tax is collected from everyone with US citizenship regardless of residency.
> Property tax is independent of corporate income tax.
Politically, it's very much not, at least not anymore. As we said, property is now a concept almost entirely linked to companies, on the scale we're talking about. Very few people directly own the personal corporate jets they fly around in (this is just an example, please don't nitpick -- you can replace it with pretty much any item of significant value you can think of, with very few exceptions).
> You can incorporate your business in whichever jurisdiction has the most favorable taxes. You can't file your personal taxes there unless you actually live and have citizenship there.
That's unfortunately not the case. The UK has non-dom arrangements for non-citizens spending significant time there; most countries will have something similar -- the only exception being the US, which can sort-of strong-arm its own citizens because of its exceptional power and reach. In most cases, the global elite can shop around for their preferred residency, Montecarlo being the pioneer in this sort of market.
> [living on a boat] is clearly illegal unless you actually do.
Unless you're famous enough that authorities can easily clock the time you spend here or there, determining where you live X days per year in this day and age is extremely difficult.
This is why a lot of famous people move to Montecarlo then have to eventually switch back: unlike your average industrialist, they're very easy to keep track of, being a small elite with entire industries dedicated to tracking their movements and publicise them. Why did they think of moving to Montecarlo in the first place? Because that's perfectly normal among the "regularly rich".
> And I don't think that works in the US
Yes, the US is an exception. Most other countries accomodate this exception in their legal code, because their interest is to attract wealthy US citizens to their shores. You cannot extend this norm to all countries, nor would it be likely to survive the day the US stopped to be the dominant superpower it currently is.
> As we said, property is now a concept almost entirely linked to companies, on the scale we're talking about.
And property tax still has nothing to do with corporate income tax, so I don't know what you're talking about.
> Unless you're famous enough that authorities can easily clock the time you spend here or there, determining where you live X days per year in this day and age is extremely difficult.
Not difficult, just expensive. But this is not rocket science: Probably someone who makes more than $100,000 annually and claims to live on a boat, doesn't. So make the fine higher than the cost of the surveillance and go bust all the liars and make back your costs.
- Corporate jets are not the kind of property that is taxed in most places (are there any jurisdictions that tax this kind of property?!) -- in all cases I know of, property tax is applied to real estate, and I suspect is mostly borne by individuals.
- Shopping for preferred residency is not what this is about -- if you actually live in Monte Carlo, it only stands to reason that you would be paying taxes in Monte Carlo.
- This exact time clocking actually happens everywhere all the time (e.g. take Florida residency as an example, or US tax residency for that matter)
Er, "most people" certainly don't do that; and incorporating comes at a tax penalty (corporate profits that are distributed to shareholders are taxed again) -- the primary reason people are doing it is limited liability. And people can and do end up in jail for not paying taxes.
> In the end, you can recover the same money by taxing dividends and income accordingly, and it's far more difficult to hide those
Don't forget VAT. People think of VAT as a consumption tax and corporate income tax as an income tax, but they're essentially the same thing because one entity's consumption is the next one's income. The primary difference between them is what happens at the jurisdictional border and that difference is why VAT is collectable and corporate income tax isn't.
There is no guarantee that you can collect tax through dividend and income. Companies don't have to pay dividends (Buffet's Berkshire doesn't pay dividends but is wildly profitable), and there is no way for a country to tax capital gains from a foreign stock holder.
What difference does it make if a German investor contributes capital to a U.S. business and as a result makes money that doesn't get taxed by the U.S.? (And could be taxed by Germany.)
The U.S. government could perfectly well fund itself by taxing only the income of its residents, who are the ones benefiting from its sovereignty. You could argue that foreign investors are benefiting as well, but only in a way (capital investment) that also directly benefits U.S. businesses and investors, which in turn will pay more salary, dividend, and capital gains taxes.
The US does tax that kind of income (generally). Look up "withholding tax". It's something like 15% or 20%. As a Canadian I have to be aware of this when investing in US-domiciled stocks. (But in the end tax-treaties means that investments held in special accounts like RRSPs get around the withholding tax. Not sure if Germany has such a treaty though.)
"What difference does it make if a German investor contributes capital to a U.S. business and as a result makes money that doesn't get taxed by the U.S.? (And could be taxed by Germany.)"
That business is still benefiting quite a bit from being in the US. They're employing workers that were educated by the US education system, they're sending goods and services on roads built and maintained in the US, and they're benefiting from police, fire, and emergency medical services provided in the US. Quit pretending that a company is an island.
"The U.S. government could perfectly well fund itself by taxing only the income of its residents, who are the ones benefiting from its sovereignty."
As I just pointed out, that's not true. The German investor is benefiting quite a bit from the services the US is providing to the business they're investing in.
"but only in a way (capital investment) that also directly benefits U.S. businesses and investors, which in turn will pay more salary, dividend, and capital gains taxes."
That, I agree. Progressive taxation is an intractable problem because on one side you want to make the rich pay more, and on the other you don't want to discourage growth or the black economy; but it's a problem that has to be addressed. It's simply not true that Apple and a mom&pop store are the same "concept" under the rule of law, you need arbitrary thresholds to distinguish them, and it's a very imperfect art.
I kind of agree, but with all sorts of hesitation. I agree that corporate tax is nearly impossible to police fairly or sanely and that this suggests something is broke deeper down.
OTOH, I don't think you achieve the same result with taxing dividends. First, I assume you mean capital gains or any income from investment. Just like corporation tax, this is full of loopholes, avoidance strategies and illegal but undetected non-payment. The latter moreso.
The crux of the matter is that when you have a greater control over ownership structures and the like, you can work around whatever definitions tax law puts in place.
I suspect that a clean fix of corporate tax, if it can be found at all, will be find in fundamentals of corporate law like the definition of a corporation and its rights. When it comes down to it, the legal entities that make up Google and incur (or don't) tax liabilities are pretty different from the entity in reality. All the transactions, fees and such between those "companies" are a lie.
Just move your assets to a country with banking secrecy and you won't have to pay taxes on dividends/only pay very low taxes of that country. You still don't even have to leave the EU for that (Luxembourg, Austria). When that hole is closed just move your money to the channel islands or some other tax havens under the British crown.
I kinda agree, although perhaps there might be valid policy reasons to have corporate tax as an instrument in the toolbox -- e.g. encouraging R&D or promoting energy saving investments?
There are a lot of stories lately that throw the idea of "union" in "European Union" into question. The tax discrepancies are just part of the picture; the varied immigration policies are also getting a lot of attention. Hopefully the EU can find a way to see itself as a truly unified whole, which would be of great benefit to the world.
The European Union is very diverse, with many different peoples and cultures and languages. This can be a source of strength but we also have to be mindful of our different needs. We saw that during the "PIIGS" crisis.
The Mediterranean countries badly needed to inflate their currencies to alleviate their crippling debt burden. Germany on the other hand wanted a strong currency. Because they all had the same currency only of those two parties could win. That was Germany and we still see the repercussions in the southern Europe.
The failure of the EU is becoming more apparent each day.
They cannot even account for most of their own spending[1], so they should definitely NOT be given more power.
For the union to work the richer nations must accept lower standards of living which is completely wrong (unless you are one of the poorer states).
The migration issue is a welcome demonstration of the farce. Rules, such as the Schengen agreement, are broken unilaterally and the views of the people are ignored.
Up to €30 million repayments since 2012? Is that it? these companies have billions of revenue and yet that's all they have to pay? How about fining them and the countries for doing so? This just seems wholly unfair.
This may be a small step in getting global players to play fairer, but from what I can tell this is still cheating the system and depriving countries and their citizens of badly needed tax income. All while competing unfairly with smaller non-global companies.
I don't get why the EU still hasn't managed to get this under control.
It's profits that get taxed, not revenues. By the way, Starbucks had an effective tax rate of close to 35% in 2014. So it's not like they aren't paying any taxes. The whole issue is about that mythical concept of a "fair share" of taxes.
My idea of "fair" would be to make taxes porportionate to the extent to which public infrastructures of a country are used. That may be easier to achieve through fees than through taxes, which would come closer to your idea of taxing revenues.
I would say that fees would be more fair, yes -- I don't see why the amount a company pays for using public resources should vary with its profitability: even if they don't make any money, or shift profits to a subsidiary abroad, the resources are being used anyway.
I'd posit that a far better way to judge tax contributions would be to compare them to a company's market cap. That's where we'll likely see stark realization that multi-national corporations are living the good life.
The problem with that is that changes in market cap don't directly translate to taxable income -- and when they do, they do already get taxed through capital gains.
Capital gains tax is paid by the owners of the company when they dispose of shares, not by the corporation itself.
But I agree that using market cap is not a good basis for taxation. Most companies don't even have a market cap as they are not publicly traded. And among those that do it would hurt the most innovative companies disproportionatly.
Companies would start paying dividends way too early to keep the share price low instead of investing and growing the business. Tesla has a market cap of $27bn. They would pay more than half of what GM pays in taxes if market cap was used as a basis.
I'd rather they use that money to keep innovating and tax them later on when they make a real profit and use a greater share of public infrastructures.
tax-income is first "taken" from the citizens, then the government produces services with mediocre-to-bad performance. It is generally mediocre-to-bad because there are no customer-pressure to excellence in govt. provided services. People do not pay directly, services seems to be "free", so everybody accept them as they are and nobody complains. (e.g. DMV)
Starbucks must produce a good and consistent product or go broke. Governments can produce abismal services and nothing happens.
Maybe this is a problem with your government, rather than government in general? The government produces quite good services in many European countries, especially in northern Europe. And large companies generally have very poor service.
Example: I used to live in Denmark, where the healthcare system is run by the government, and now I live in the USA, where it isn't. For me, the Danish system was far more user-friendly.
You are correct. In my country the services are abismal and corruption is rampant. I guess in Denmark there are better morals and/or a sane idealism and services are better.
Culture plays a fundamental role.
Sounds like the states should be on the hook rather than the corporations. Sneaky sneaky Netherlands and Luxembourg. Betraying your own union for self gain! How unsocial of y'all.
You are personally welcome to value publicly traded companies by their tax contributions and not by their profits. You might be a bit burned, however, when you go to trade your stocks with other people that do not share your values. And that's capitalism.
In the EU VAT returns (Sales tax) are made monthly so we could have a monthly index of those.
Employee wages are taxed weekly / monthly both income tax and national insurance (which are used for social welfare etc.) and employers contribute to national insurance - these could be reported.
We give companies limited debt liability in exchange for the social good they perform through their activities, a concept introduced in the 19thC.
It is announced daily on the news the value of the stock exchanges, I don't think it is entirely crazy to do the same for contributions to the society that bears the cost of default.
