No reasonable person on the planet can look at that table showing a €700k exit tax on a company making €200k/yr profit and think "yeah that sounds fair."

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GavinMcG 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The article admits that the 700k figure “assumes the worst-case scenario that you take the high valuation of the financial authorities (factor 13.75) as base valuation for your exit tax. Instead, you could also find someone to assess the real value of your company, which is likely lower…”

A reasonable person could absolutely think it’s fair to impose a very high exit tax on someone who doesn’t want their books examined even when it would save them money.

	▲	looping__lui 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you ever had to deal with German tax authorities - assume the actual worst case scenario.

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fxtentacle 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s the penalty tax if you refuse to file the paperwork. So it’s literally the worst case.

Plus the article is wrong about not being allowed to move out of Germany. You still can, without paying the tax, you just need to keep a shell UG/GmbH alive inside Germany.

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diggan 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's because reasonable people don't just look at two numbers and go "That's crazy", there is context and nuance to be understood, so give reading the entire blog post through instead of just skimming tables, and come back and tell us why it's unfair.

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pc86 6 days ago | parent [-]

It's a math problem - you don't need a ton of context to understand it (although I did read the entire article). This is simply the German government being petulant and punishing successful people for moving a company somewhere that understands how to create proper incentive structures for businesses to grow.

If you as an individual make €100k a year in salary, saved €20k every year, and the German government wanted to charge you €70k just to move out of Germany it'd be grounds for rebellion.

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diggan 6 days ago | parent [-]

> petulant and punishing successful people

What reason could they possibly have for "punishing successful people"? You seem to still miss almost the entire context, and automatically apply some bad faith arguments because of what, you feel like paying taxes is unfair?

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pc86 6 days ago | parent [-]

Paying taxes is good, lawful, even patriotic. Also good and lawful is moving a company somewhere where you'll pay less in taxes and can grow faster and hire more people (and is at worst patriotically neutral).

An exit tax is a country saying "oh no that's bad, so instead of looking at our tax structure and seeing why you're leaving and trying to address that, we're going to charge you >3 years of profit as a punishment." It's simply saying that if our taxes are too high for you we're going to charge you even more to try to stop you from leaving.

You can think it's a good thing if you don't understand economics but it's hard to frame it as anything other than Germany punishing corporations for leaving.

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diggan 6 days ago | parent [-]

> Also good and lawful is moving a company somewhere where you'll pay less in taxes

Agree, to an extent. You (the company) should still pay taxes on profits made within the country, before they can move out the company from the country, anything else would be unfair.

> It's simply saying that if our taxes are too high for you we're going to charge you even more to try to stop you from leaving

You can move company for any reason. If you're moving the company because the taxes are high, it sounds perfectly reasonable that you'd pay taxes before moving the company, otherwise it becomes a tax hole. And I don't think they're adding these taxes to stop them from moving, if that was the goal then they would just make it outright illegal. Instead they're trying to make sure you can't avoid paying taxes you should have paid.

> anything other than Germany punishing corporations for leaving.

Almost right, they're trying to stop companies from leaving the country without first paying their fair share of taxes. Once that's done, they're free to move wherever. Sounds reasonable to me, although I don't agree with the exact rates either.

	▲	pc86 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> You (the company) should still pay taxes on profits made within the country This is not what exit taxes are. They are punitive taxes above and beyond what you've already paid on revenue earned within the country. > If you're moving the company because the taxes are high, it sounds perfectly reasonable that you'd pay taxes before moving the company, otherwise it becomes a tax hole. Again, it seems like you don't actually understand what exit taxes are. If you earn money in Germany, you're going to pay taxes on that no matter what. Even if you leave, and the exit tax is zero, you still have to pay the income tax on that revenue.

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axus 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I wouldn't say its fair, but it's good for Germany. In the US, I don't like American companies moving to other countries.

	▲	CamperBob2 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Of course it isn't good for Germany. It causes new businesses to be started and operated somewhere else.