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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
European Union leaders will consider imposing 25 percent tariffs on a range of US imports, including steel, clothes, and food, but not bourbon or other alcoholic drinks, following US President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imports from the EU.
No, bourbon and food is small fry.
Internet services headquartered in the US. That’s the real deal.
Require a $100/per computer/per year on-going tax (phased in very slowly over 36 months, with extremely slow ramp in the first 18 months) for every enterprise Windows installation. Then figure out a similar approach for cloud computing and mobile enterprise (targeting Android/iOS). That’s how you grab the Americans by the balls.
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I recognize the irony of “year of linux on the desktop”, but we (not only EU, I say this as someone from non-EU Europe) should not be giving the Americans money. They’ve proven that they are unreliable and unwilling to deal with corruption and degeneracy in their country. No disrespect to sane Americans, but at the end of the day they too need to make things happen.
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As I said, no disrespect to sane Americans.
I’ve lived in the US and travelled extensively around the country (not only Manhattan and north-western part of LA), there are many sane Americans even in provincial pro-corruption hotspots.
But until the sane Americans implement true anti-corruption, judicial and election reforms (no Obama style “hope and change” bullshit), it is reasonable to expect nothing good to come out of the US. Even if a hypothetical Michelle Obama administration takes power in the next election (which is a giant if), that’s not going to change anything until the Americans stop treating their oligarchs and criminal groups as sacred cows.
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I honestly don’t know what to say other than I wish you luck (no irony intended); it will benefit both you and me and you and our countries (and the world).
Lets be realistic here, everything from MAGA dominated states is small fry, they are not exactly the most productive states.
Devils advocate, most of those states are agriculture heavy. What do you mean by productive?
I mean they are literally some of the poorest US states with the lowest GDP per capita, the highest poverty rates, the highest rates of people who need government support,… and most relevant for this discussion, the least valuable exports.
Even better: services. Tariff Facebook ads, Netflix subscriptions, Office 365, Amazon Prime. If the corporations want to pull the strings in government, hit them directly.
Yes, that would be part of it. Windows on enterprise is just a good, simple example.
Invoke anti coercion regulations and suspend intellectual property rights of the US companies. Job done.
I think that surprising amount of them are already located in Ireland for that and other tax related possibilities. Giant corporations are basically pirates sailing on lawless waters.
Target HQ based on consolidated financial account reporting not regional HQ. Doesn’t matter if you have a regional subsidiary in Ireland or Moldova. If the final accounts/HQs are US-based all transactions in Europe get hit with massive on-going subscription-style tariffs (since ICT services are largely subscription based).
If only tax-evasion was so easily solved. The are not shy of restructuring completely just to fit into any gap that law created. On paper “BigBadCorpo US” and “BigBadCorpo Irealand” could be two completely separate entities, with BBCI turning zero to no profits becouse it license brand from BBCUS.
You would think that Worner Bross is a movie making company. It’s not. On paper it’s a company that lend very overprices movie equipment. To shell companies created solely for the purpose of creating one movie…
Taxes are hard and people who employ literal armies of layers have the edge over slow law making.
While this is true, it’s also a matter of desire and commitment.
Case in point, the US companies all publish consolidated accounts and often break out Europe, albeit sometimes it’s EMEA not Europe.
You can target the final consolidated accounts and focus on revenues if the companies don’t provide actual numbers for Europe (or if it looks like there is something fishy going on, which there is).
Company A is in Poland. You regulate law in Poland. Company B is in USA. You don’t regulate a law in USA.
You want to tax company A, based on company B report, that was created for 3rd party government?
I recognize that this is not exactly a reasonable approach.
But sometimes (when the situation is dire and you’re dealing with unreasonable, profoundly corrupt individuals that lack humanity) you need to take an active (not reactive) approach.
Literally just say “You made $20B (revenue) in Europe as per your 10-K, you will pay $4B and we don’t care what you have to say because we both know you are dishonest and corrupt. Lying is not going to work!”
I am not saying that now is the time to use such measures. But to completely deny any active postures and solely leverage a reactive approach does not work.
That’s not unreasonable. That’s a law-suit. They will get back all this money with surplus.
Imagine that you have a company A. And you legitimately licens something from 3rd party company B. That’s your cost.
And you license something else from company C… that’s your profit some how?
On paper your relationship with company B and C is identical. There is nothing tangible linking you to company C more than B.
And if you manage to find something, they will shift the structure and change it.
You probably pay higher taxes than some of those companies.
Pirates. Enemies of the human kind.
See, you’re still thinking on their terms. It’s a fundamentally a reactive approach. You let American oligarchs (and their supporters among the American population) define the rules of the game. I will note that I agree with you that you’ll never beat their army of lawyers (on their own terms).
I am saying develop and implement approaches where the lawyers don’t matter. You tell the US oligarchs that they must pay X billion additional tariff fees based on data that identifies their commercial activity in Europe (I worked in tech market research at one point and there are reliable private data sources that allow you to make relatively accurate estimates around US company sales in Europe; irrespective of legal structure).
You tell them that they are welcome to say no and you’d happy for them to engage in lawsuits or bawsuits or do whatever they want. But you warn them that they might not like the outcome.
When they do say “no!” you go all in and de facto ban all American IT services and shut down their business in Europe.
Now I am not saying this has to be done immediately (or done at all). You can initially try and work with them for a long time, but all throughout this process you keep a full menu of options open, including de facto seizing their assets and implementing a blanket ban (either explicit or a fee structure that makes their business non-viable) on all American IT services.
I am just saying that we need to expand our horizon of capabilities beyond the rules set by Americans. It stupid to come to a gun fight with boxing gloves.
I feel that would grab our European balls more than theirs. Practically everyone is heavily invested in AWS, Azure or GCP with few actual European alternatives, and migration to a new provider being a massive undertaking for a lot of those projects.
I definitely agree, I work in the industry so I have no childish illusions about how painful this would be.
That being said, it is not completely out of the realm of reality. China still uses Windows/Android/iOS, but they have their own cloud providers and they are making massive inroads with respect to semiconductors and homegrown components. And they are working on getting rid of American operating syste6m and I think in ~10 years they will succeed.
At some point you need to make a call around whether using American tech is in your interests. Moving off American tech will never be easy, the question is when and how you do it and how you manage the pain.
And mark my words, the Americans are only going to get even volatile and chauvinistic. Unfortunately, the sane Americans lack risk-tolerance and motivation (they are in a broad sense too well off to care if their country moves from current early proto-fascism to full on facism).