Under Pressure From Trump, EU Introduces Corporate Levy Instead Of Digital Tax
Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
In the end, are we working only for the state? What was once dismissed as a light-hearted exaggeration is becoming reality step by step. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the end of World War II, Germany has developed a fever for taxation. Berlin is raising levies unreasonably, from the sugar tax to tobacco and alcohol taxes, from higher top income-tax rates and the super-rich tax to the highly probable increase in inheritance tax – increasingly, the substance of the middle class is also coming into the sights of Berlin’s central planners.
Berlin has launched a species-threatening hunt for the taxpayer.
It is truly an absurd idea, if not knowingly destructive policy, to keep expanding the state apparatus at the expense of the private sector in order to overcome a crisis that this very state apparatus has brought about with its ideology, its degrowth policies and its boundless belief in what can be engineered.
But as if this tax policy were not already fatal enough, Brussels too is demanding an increasing share of the shrinking economic pie. The Commission is feeling the growing pressure to finance itself. From 2028 onward, the refinancing of the €800 billion NextGenerationEU Eurobond will come due. Ursula von der Leyen also wants to lock in her two-trillion-euro budget as quickly and quietly as possible. Every new source of tax revenue therefore comes in handy.
The state paradox is this: The more capital or credit politicians have at their disposal, the faster new demands, new follow-up costs and economic ruins emerge – the state is the great maw into which citizens can pour tax money at will – in the end, it always cries out for more and more.
So far, the EU Commission has primarily collected funds from EU customs revenues. There are also extraction vehicles such as the CO₂ emissions trading system and its own plastic tax.
To expand its tax base, Brussels originally planned to introduce a digital levy. Large digital companies, platforms such as Google, Amazon and X, were to be bled for their contribution to the common good, as the argument always goes. The Brussels Commission officially abandoned this plan this week – the pressure from Washington, namely from the US president himself, apparently proved too great to maintain these plans.
Instead, a special levy on large corporations operating economically in the EU is now planned. It would be an annual flat-rate charge for companies with net revenues of more than €100 million. Depending on the revenue class, the contribution would range from €100,000 to €750,000 per year. That sounds like a trifle, payable out of the petty cash of many large corporations. But every little bit adds up. And so Brussels repeatedly succeeds in creating the impression that the gigantic fiscal raid burdens only a few wealthy people, spares the middle class and ultimately remains within limits.
Beyond the fiscal dimension, the planned digital tax naturally also had a trade-policy function. It was conceived as a weapon, directed against the Chinese and American digital corporations that have left the Europeans hopelessly behind technologically. The logic was: If you cannot compete, at least collect plenty of taxes from them.
We know this all too well from Brussels.
With the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, the Brussels Commission developed mechanisms to derive regular heavy fines from the supposed grey zone in which the digital corporations operate – through alleged violations of copyright rules or through a lack of consumer and data protection – an eternal source of irritation and continuing provocations that by no means contribute to pacifying the American-European relationship.
With the planned digital levy, this extraction policy was supposed to be cast into a foundation. A secure financial stream for Brussels was planned, but the White House ultimately eliminated it with a firm hand.
That it is now European companies, of all companies, those economically engaged in the EU, that will step into the breach to fill this already budgeted revenue is typical of this EU: Bureaucracy requires higher tax burdens. A power structure has become entrenched that now increasingly develops its own sources of taxation like an autonomous state.
What we are actually witnessing is a bidding war over the fight for the slowly shrinking tax pie at every level of government.
It must be said plainly: The Brussels power apparatus, having solidified into an extraction mechanism, appears impossible to reform. New political forces will be needed to rebuild this structure so that it serves the interests of European citizens. A common protection of the EU’s external borders and the revival of the single market would be major projects of absolute priority. The taxpayer-funded system of patronage must come to an end.
Economic constructs such as the Green Deal and the absurd subsidy sectors created from it, from the hydrogen economy to the storage of CO₂ in the seabed, consume ever larger sums in subsidies and government support year after year. Uncontrollably high government debt, deepening crowding-out of the private sector in the capital and labour markets, as well as the increasing drain of resources to finance this bankrupt economy, are the harvest reaped by a society that places its fate in the hands of these ideologues.
The debt and tax spirals inevitably turn in sync. They are spinning faster and make it clear that higher government spending and higher tax payments will solve none of the numerous problems created by the modern party state.
European bureaucratism has married German statism. Faith in free enterprise, in the free market economy as an institutional model for prosperity, democracy and individual sovereignty, has been lost in the ever deeper corridors of the administrative machinery.
The wait for EU citizens to recognise the historically well-documented superiority of civil society over every form of statist interpretation has begun – a tough, frustrating undertaking that nevertheless brings us closer, with time, to the inevitable debt crisis. And crisis, as we know, means a turning point.
Tyler Durden Sat, 10/17/2026 - 09:20
Continue reading...
[ H/T ZeroHedge ]
Submitted by Thomas Kolbe
In the end, are we working only for the state? What was once dismissed as a light-hearted exaggeration is becoming reality step by step. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the end of World War II, Germany has developed a fever for taxation. Berlin is raising levies unreasonably, from the sugar tax to tobacco and alcohol taxes, from higher top income-tax rates and the super-rich tax to the highly probable increase in inheritance tax – increasingly, the substance of the middle class is also coming into the sights of Berlin’s central planners.
Berlin has launched a species-threatening hunt for the taxpayer.
It is truly an absurd idea, if not knowingly destructive policy, to keep expanding the state apparatus at the expense of the private sector in order to overcome a crisis that this very state apparatus has brought about with its ideology, its degrowth policies and its boundless belief in what can be engineered.
But as if this tax policy were not already fatal enough, Brussels too is demanding an increasing share of the shrinking economic pie. The Commission is feeling the growing pressure to finance itself. From 2028 onward, the refinancing of the €800 billion NextGenerationEU Eurobond will come due. Ursula von der Leyen also wants to lock in her two-trillion-euro budget as quickly and quietly as possible. Every new source of tax revenue therefore comes in handy.
The state paradox is this: The more capital or credit politicians have at their disposal, the faster new demands, new follow-up costs and economic ruins emerge – the state is the great maw into which citizens can pour tax money at will – in the end, it always cries out for more and more.
So far, the EU Commission has primarily collected funds from EU customs revenues. There are also extraction vehicles such as the CO₂ emissions trading system and its own plastic tax.
To expand its tax base, Brussels originally planned to introduce a digital levy. Large digital companies, platforms such as Google, Amazon and X, were to be bled for their contribution to the common good, as the argument always goes. The Brussels Commission officially abandoned this plan this week – the pressure from Washington, namely from the US president himself, apparently proved too great to maintain these plans.
Instead, a special levy on large corporations operating economically in the EU is now planned. It would be an annual flat-rate charge for companies with net revenues of more than €100 million. Depending on the revenue class, the contribution would range from €100,000 to €750,000 per year. That sounds like a trifle, payable out of the petty cash of many large corporations. But every little bit adds up. And so Brussels repeatedly succeeds in creating the impression that the gigantic fiscal raid burdens only a few wealthy people, spares the middle class and ultimately remains within limits.
Beyond the fiscal dimension, the planned digital tax naturally also had a trade-policy function. It was conceived as a weapon, directed against the Chinese and American digital corporations that have left the Europeans hopelessly behind technologically. The logic was: If you cannot compete, at least collect plenty of taxes from them.
We know this all too well from Brussels.
With the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, the Brussels Commission developed mechanisms to derive regular heavy fines from the supposed grey zone in which the digital corporations operate – through alleged violations of copyright rules or through a lack of consumer and data protection – an eternal source of irritation and continuing provocations that by no means contribute to pacifying the American-European relationship.
With the planned digital levy, this extraction policy was supposed to be cast into a foundation. A secure financial stream for Brussels was planned, but the White House ultimately eliminated it with a firm hand.
That it is now European companies, of all companies, those economically engaged in the EU, that will step into the breach to fill this already budgeted revenue is typical of this EU: Bureaucracy requires higher tax burdens. A power structure has become entrenched that now increasingly develops its own sources of taxation like an autonomous state.
What we are actually witnessing is a bidding war over the fight for the slowly shrinking tax pie at every level of government.
It must be said plainly: The Brussels power apparatus, having solidified into an extraction mechanism, appears impossible to reform. New political forces will be needed to rebuild this structure so that it serves the interests of European citizens. A common protection of the EU’s external borders and the revival of the single market would be major projects of absolute priority. The taxpayer-funded system of patronage must come to an end.
Economic constructs such as the Green Deal and the absurd subsidy sectors created from it, from the hydrogen economy to the storage of CO₂ in the seabed, consume ever larger sums in subsidies and government support year after year. Uncontrollably high government debt, deepening crowding-out of the private sector in the capital and labour markets, as well as the increasing drain of resources to finance this bankrupt economy, are the harvest reaped by a society that places its fate in the hands of these ideologues.
The debt and tax spirals inevitably turn in sync. They are spinning faster and make it clear that higher government spending and higher tax payments will solve none of the numerous problems created by the modern party state.
European bureaucratism has married German statism. Faith in free enterprise, in the free market economy as an institutional model for prosperity, democracy and individual sovereignty, has been lost in the ever deeper corridors of the administrative machinery.
The wait for EU citizens to recognise the historically well-documented superiority of civil society over every form of statist interpretation has begun – a tough, frustrating undertaking that nevertheless brings us closer, with time, to the inevitable debt crisis. And crisis, as we know, means a turning point.
Tyler Durden Sat, 10/17/2026 - 09:20
Continue reading...
[ H/T ZeroHedge ]
