Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

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That's not the issue. If your business is dependent on slave labor and offloading your externalities on the society to make a profit it simply means your business should not exist.

Its evident that labor cost and taxes are not excessive in EU by the reality of existence of plenty of businesses in a healthy society.

What doesn't exist in EU is the "tech" business, and the tech doesn't have margins too slim to employ people and pay taxes. On the contrary, the margins are fat. The reason that the tech sector isn't a large one in EU is that its easy to incorporate in USA and access the full EU market from there instead of incorporating in some small EU country and deal with their bureaucracy and internal border limitations. The 28th regime and the EU-INC is to address exactly that.

If the USA-EU relations deteriorate enough, it will also create instant trillion Euros market. Just look at the quarterly reports of US tech giants, they generate EU revenues that are not that behind the US revenues. For Apple thats %60 of the US revenue, or ~110B$ for the last quarter and that's happening despite Apple having a much smaller market share in EU.

A full blown conflict between US-EU will be a huge opportunity to replicate the US tech sector in EU and having an EU-INC will be the necessary facilitator that is currently missing when compared with the landscape in USA.

Cost of labour i meant work taxation. You can see the waste everywhere. We could have half income tax, half social security and half health. Instead of taking 50% you your income. We could give 25%. And have more to boost the economy or save for future. EU is in slow death. Dying out, pyramid scheme retirement system mostly.

I'm not so sure about that. Elon Musk and Trump promised something of this sort, created the DOGE department and ended up not saving anything despite claiming to uncover waste.

> Dying out, pyramid scheme retirement system mostly.

The solution to this is more creampies 20 years ago, no government action can change that. Every generation pays for the retirement of the previous one and if a generation makes less kids then they put higher burden on those kids. Before the taxes and pensions people used to look after their aging parents, today people who live in cities and pay taxes so that they can have independent lives from their parents. That's how biology works, people born procreate age and die and if you live in a society the young ones take care of the old onces until they die.

Well the slovak goverment alone stole billions of euros. Stole. Imagine if we didnt have to pay all the farm subsidies to keep 5 goats in mountains. Or to pay hungary for lookout towers in the middle of nowhere.

Sound like you should go after the Slovak government

Well, isn’t the EU supposed to watch out for this? Taxe frauds with VAT are a big deal. And nothing gets done. But people making peanuts will get taxed to the tits…

> If your business is dependent on slave labor

There is no such thing as slave labor in the tech sector. Some countries offer a lower barrier to entry than others. The EU has a very high barrier to entry when it comes to taxation.

You can believe what you want, but I think every country's goal is to reduce taxation as much as possible for companies and for people. Unfortunately, the current in the EU is to keep raising them and give state more and more monopoly on services.

EU doesn't actually have power to tax people, each government does its own taxation. They come up with agreements like minimum tax levels to prevent things like pretending to be in Ireland to avoid taxes in France but that's about it.

Most of the Europeans trust the government more that they trust the businesses and demand some services to be provided by the government and they all collect taxes accordingly. Some countries like Bulgaria have relatively small governments and do %10 flat tax for companies and individuals and other countries like France or Germany provide robust government services and safety net and do much higher taxation.

The assumption that a company can pay US tax rates while selling into the EU is perhaps one that should be questioned, like the ability to pay Chinese tax rates while selling into the US.

(see Apple Ireland)

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