If Amazon pays its employees income, and those employees pay income tax, how is that different to Amazon paying tax? The government gets its money from Amazon either way.
Because the tax system isn’t designed to be based solely around income tax. In order to make up the missing funds where corporation tax ought to be, personal taxation would have to be considerably higher, which would also mean that employee wages would have to be higher to compensate. The overall perctange of revenue paid into the tax system by the corporation would be the same via higher employee wages.
However, we do not live in a personal taxation only system. Corporations are therefore able to radically reduce their tax spend by avoiding corporation tax and not increasing spend on wages. The total amount of tax paid by the corporation goes down. This is obviously true, otherwise there would exist no motive for companies to pursue strategies of paying such low corporation tax.
If the CEO wants to buy a new Ferrari, they need to take money out of the company - either as income or dividends (both of which are taxed). If the company buys him his car then it's a taxable benefit too. If the company increases the value of the CEOs shares by doing share buybacks, then the CEO just pays more capital gains taxes. Avoiding corporation tax means the tax paid directly by the company goes down, but it's not at all obvious that the net amount the government receives goes down. Only direct taxes are reflected on their balance sheet, though, which is a good enough incentive.
Fine, re-structure the tax system around income tax. But at the moment it means your local book shop pays corporation tax whereas Amazon doesn't.
In the UK it's double broken, because shops have high rates of business rates (which don't go away if you're not profitable), whereas giant warehouses attract very low business rates.
> If Amazon pays its employees income, and those employees pay income tax, how is that different to Amazon paying tax? The government gets its money from Amazon either way.
You mean, from consumers, who pay Amazon.
Or, maybe from those consumer’s employers, who pay them wages. Or...
Once you start posting
posting that game, it never ends.
Your link just explains that they’re trying to reduce the gap between tax income and expenditure, but the absolute level of expenditure (my link) has gone up every year (in real terms too)!
As a citizen of the UK I can tell you that until Brexit became along the political narrative since Cameron became PM had been all about 'The Cuts'. The fact that, despite widespread cuts to the civil service and the police, spending has increased just goes to show that ideology has become more important than sense in 2018.
Talking about the specifics however, the number of police officers in the UK have been reduced by around 19 thousand. Since that only leaves 126k I hope you will find that significant. I find the continued expenditure on unproven gadgets rather distasteful against this backdrop.
> Banks get to create the principal that they loan out of thin air[1]
I’m not sure how you get this from your reference - people deposit money at a bank, and the bank lends (gives!) some of that money out to (e.g.) students. The “creation” comes from both the depositor and the borrower thinking they have the money.
In theory it's all supposed to be put to bed before the transition starts, I have my doubts though, in fact I still have doubts whether it will happen at all.
Why do you lose a say over global standards? Surely you now represent yourselves directly on global standards bodies, instead of indirectly via the EU's common position?
But there's no representation on the EU standards bodies at all, and realistically there are two kinds of standard manufacturers tend to care about: US (mostly UL) and CE.
Losing the ability to affect these European standards is a price to pay, Brexit being one big trade-off after all. But I'm still unclear on what the advantages are that make it worth it.
