Europe is crippling its own economies far more – Latest News
French President Emmanuel Macron is improper to chuckle off President Donald Trump’s newest menace to slap a 100% tariff on French wine and champagne if Paris doesn’t nix its 3% “digital tax” on high tech corporations — and never simply because it angers Washington.
The French determine it’s a intelligent strategy to ding these annoying American tech bros — the French brazenly call it the “GAFAM tax” as a result of it slams Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.
That’s what it was designed to do, by focusing on corporations with gross sales of no less than $860 million worldwide and $28 million in France — ranges no European tech firm comes close to hitting.
Which is to say: The Europeans have no tech sector, which makes a joke of the France’s supposed aim of “tech sovereignty” (that is, independence of international companies), the excuse for passing GAFAM back in 2019.
Nor is this the one means European Union nations milk US tech companies: The EU collects more from fines on these US corporations than from taxing all EU public tech companies mixed.
Those fines are for not bending to the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, which impose censorship mandates and different controls essentially antithetical to the tech tradition.
All this — the crippling regulation, the predatory taxation — explains why European tech by no means will get off the ground, and certainly that the majority EU economies haven’t grown in any respect within the twenty first century.
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Macron and his allies sniff at Trump’s tariffs as banes on the worldwide economic system, however what’s really strangling their economies are their own more-backward insurance policies.
The joke’s on them.
