National sovereignty is not national pride. Paying company taxes to the 28th regime evicts tax contributions to the company's home nation. Massive German tax money is already today used for non-national interests. EU-inc makes this only worse.
I don't understand the tax objection. The 28th regime changes corporate law, not fiscal law. A Berlin-based "EU-Inc" still pays full taxes (Körperschaftsteuer, Gewerbesteuer, etc.) to the local Finanzamt. It isn't a disembodied tax haven - it just standardizes the legal wrapper.
You are right that this threatens the status quo, though. If this works, founders based in Germany will likely abandon the GmbH. That will require swallowing some national pride and admitting that the current system is simply a less efficient, less competitive legal form for high-growth companies.
One thing I think is also worth mentioning are labor rights. I am not arguing against the German model of employee protection. Mitbestimmung could be viewed as a good thing, even if it will mean less power to the VC and / or founders. And frankly, I don't care if the consensus forces strict, German-style Mitbestimmung on the EU-Inc. Stricter form of EU-INC is still vastly better than nothing at all.
This is wrong on so many levels. The German economy profits _a lot_ from the membership.
You can't just look at the monetary in/out flows to/from EU accounts but to the system as a whole.
For example, decades of pegging the value of the currency down, thus facilitating exports on a massive scale and thus pushing up the performance of whole industries, without other member states that would have had their currency devaluated being able to compete on prize.
They probably didn't list any because estimating the upsides versus the downsides is what it's about, and that's very hard to quantify. Suggesting, like you seem to, that there are no upsides to the German economy whatsoever, is just not a serious argument so doesn't actually deserve a serious answer.
I agree with your characterisation of what is going on, and at some point, the EU states will have to decide for full fiscal integration or for removing the common currency. You can't have a common currency without a common fiscal union. So we either have to integrate more or desintegrate more, this inbetween we have now is not working very well. Speaking as a European, not sure what is better.
Not related to the comment, but in general I agree with you.
You can't have a single monetary system without complete unification, including tax systems, budgeting systems, governance models, retirement systems, benefits. I mean, you can, like we have now, but it's not sustainable, and eventually we all have it worse.
As a European, I would not want to go that way, since I'm afraid such a unified EU will be a bureaucratic monster that is even more centralized than the USA, and way more autocratic than any current EU state.
I'd rather take a step back, dissolve much of the EU's competences, and go back to pure trade union, dissolve the EURO as a currency, and let every member state take sovereign decisions on their own.
I recently became much more pro-total-unification, so let me give you this counterpoint: individually, European nations are no match to the major superpowers, neither economically nor militarily. We'll get gutted by divide-and-conquer approach. In contrast, bound much closer together (particularly with some form of pan-european armed forces), the EU would become a proper global superpower and a counterbalance for the USA and China.
You cant really believe any of the EU countries actually want to work together? The EU was only possible with the premise of countries keeping their autonomy. Believe me when I say that us Germans would rather go to war than merge with France, just as an example.
>> - yes, German taxpayers are indeed funding bicycle lanes in foreign countries
Just for people to know this, we are talking about 44Mn€ (20Mn€ + 24Mn€) of money in Peru as the commentator mentions below. It is wasteful but it has practically no effect on Germany. There are 1000x things that Germany does within Germany that moves the needle more than the talking about this rounding error. But that requires introspection and ownership of responsibility - both alien to the country’s normal compliance attitude of working.
That's the same fallacy as claiming that rich people save money by donating to charity.
Simple example:
- Germany gives 100 € to other EU states
- Those states 100 € to buy made in Germany goods
- German companies have 10 € profits from those sales
- German state collects 5 € from those profits
In summary, German taxpayers paid 100 € so the state can collect 5 € taxes, and companies another 5 €. Not a very good deal.
And this calculation is crazy optimistic, because it assumes that all money that Germany gives to other countries will be used to purchase German good. In reality, they will be spent willy-nilly and German companies may not see even 1 € in return.
This calculation is flawed. German state collects much more than 5€, because there is VAT etc and, of course, employees of that company pay income tax from their share of that 100€ they just got back.
What people like you dont understand is what we get back from investing into foreign countries. We dont just build bicycle lanes there because we are such nice people.
This can happen without putting the most part of intensive payload in a form of external dependencies that can be cut at any point by many factors, while losing all the skills and knowledge on how to effectively plant and harvest. Qualified farmers don’t appear magically over night, let alone people with the passion required to invest their own life into it.
And exporting the model that ravaged one own land, selling the poison that was forbidden in the countries exporting it, what kind of behavior is that? Letting some land having a bit of rest while the same depletion process is applied elsewhere, how fair is that?
