Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: The Uses of Dotcom, in reply to Pete George,
Is your patron going to retire if he keeps polling zero, then?
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Hard News: Growing up in public, in reply to BenWilson,
I remember seeing a couple of cops walk into a backpackers poorly disguised as tradies (Bunnings shirts) looking for someone. They had giant handguns on their belts, loosely covered by the shirts.
If they did that here, they'd just trigger a flood of calls to the AOS about a couple of blokes walking around with poorly concealed handguns.
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Hard News: Aiming for the feet, in reply to Matthew Poole,
My understanding is that an FTT is not meant to catch ordinary business transactions such as import/export payments, but to tax global speculative capital flows, which form the majority of financial transactions of all kinds.
Sadly, even if all the OECD countries were to participate, this wouldn't stop speculative transactions moving to some offshore location that's willing to operate an untaxed market.
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Here's an example of the type of tax avoidance that goes on:
Apple pays $3.9mln in NZ tax on $500mln plus turnover -
SCUDs trained on various places in the region and Americans were bailing out from Europe and places like Egypt (we taught a couple of them to pass as Canadians
Those must indeed be smart missiles ;-)
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Hard News: Growing up in public, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
Bloody yanks, thinking everyone plays basketball.
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An FTT as usually proposed would be trivial for large companies to evade. It would only take one jurisdiction not to participate or to set a smaller rate/flat fee/etc. Banks would then simply structure transactions such that they nominally took place in Vanuatu or the Cayman Islands between shell companies set up for the purpose. Look at the Eurobond market for an example.
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Hard News: Aiming for the feet, in reply to Chris Waugh,
a long time and a lot of complex negotiation
And will be opposed down the line with all the resources of multi-national businesses, making arguments such as "it's all to complicated", "it'll break the internet", "how can we ban websites".
Tax isn't actually complicated. You and I pay tax on our earnings on a progressive basis. So do most businesses that don't have the scale to construct tax-dodging schemes.
We just need to go back to deciding the answer to a fairly simple question: how much money are ABC Corp making out of NZ?
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Hard News: Aiming for the feet, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
The problem is that the current basis of tax (declared profits), while fine for a corner store, doesn't work well when a company can manipulate its accounts so that profits pop-up in a no tax/low tax jurisdiction, like Ireland.
(Facebook is a poor example - they don't pay much tax because they don't make much profit - $1.5bln a year off 1.1billion users, 2.4mln of whom are in NZ, so any fairly attributed tax system would raise of the order of a million bucks, not enough to finance the litigation costs of extraction.)
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Hard News: Aiming for the feet, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Exactly. If Progressive refused to pay tax, we'd shut them down, however much people needed groceries. Somebody would buy the stores from the receiver and start them up again.
Of course it wouldn't come to that, companies usually write a tax cheque in the end. (Unless they are "Apprentice" presenters, in which case they try and bullshit the courts up to the last possible moment).