All tax is ultimately paid by the end user. Do you prefer to have 20% more expensive iPhones, that is the actual question.
Re:Apple to Pay £3.8m Tax on £1.2bn UK Sales
by kevcampb on Monday July 01, 2019 @10:45AM
(#20325745)
If I am another company competing against Apple and paying my share of taxes, then yes.
Re:Apple to Pay £3.8m Tax on £1.2bn UK Sales
by AnthonyMouse on Monday July 01, 2019 @10:49AM
(#20325796)
More to the point, if you fold corporate income tax into VAT then maybe you pay more for iPhones, but then you pay less for all domestic products (assuming the total tax revenue remains the same), and so the primary consequence is only removing the relative disadvantage for domestic companies.
If it means a sensible social services – yes.
Does it?
No, it could be taken from the amount gained by Apple shareholders.
Yeah, and that won't reflect in the price of the products, right?
The problem is the same as it has always been -- profit is easy to move around, so it ends up in the jurisdiction with the lowest taxes.
Then people get upset that they have billions in sales and are paying minimal taxes, but whose fault is that really? Nobody is preventing you from collecting tax on sales. If you instead only collect tax on profits, and the entity which is actually in your jurisdiction has minimal profits, blame yourself for choosing that tax structure, not the company for responding to it.
It's simple enough for a legislature to replace corporate income tax with VAT if they really want to tax based on sales. And if they don't then what are they complaining about? Would the UK really be in a different position if the US had a lower corporate tax rate and Apple reported its profits there instead?