A report in the Guardian today says that Amazon UK paid just £4.2 million in tax last year, despite selling goods worth £4.3 billion. The report goes on to day that this "brings to just over £10m its contribution to the public purse through corporation tax in a decade. Over the last four years, Amazon has generated £23 billion in British Sales".
For me, the solution is simple. Governments should offer to abolish corporation tax everywhere in the EU. But in exchange, we should introduce a tiny Financial Transaction Tax on all electronic transactions.
In the UK, corporation tax raises just under £40 billion a year. That number is about 0.002% of the level of UK financial transactions (over £1840 trillion).
Similarly, in France, the "Impôts sur les sociétés" generated €39 billion in 2011. While transactions in France are a lot lower than in the UK (I got a total of €273 trillion from the BIS figures for 2012), it would still be possible to replace the Impôt sur les sociétés by an FTT of just 0.014%.
And, of course, the best thing would be for all Central Banks to fix an FTT on all transactions in their currency - wherever they occur in the World. That way, it wouldn't matter whether the euros were being used for trades in Paris, Frankfurt, London, New York or Singapour - the ECB would recover the tax payments and could distribute the money between the 18 Eurozone countries simply on the basis of relative population size.
As you are probably aware, I would like to scrap not just Corporation Tax, but also Income tax, VAT and a whole pile of other pointless taxes. But, strategically, it may be a good plan to offer to scrap Corporation taxes first. That way there would be very strong backing from business, and this would help get the FTT idea through the door.....
No comments:
Post a Comment