This is insanity. It's not just the money taken in taxes, it's the fact that you additionally have to deal with the additional administrative overhead of filling out US tax paperwork, praying you don't get it wrong or paying a US-focused advisor to do it for you.
This feels like a really bad deal for non Americans. From Intuit Canada:<p>> If taxes were deducted from your income, you can claim those taxes as if you paid them to the CRA. Because you have a duty to report all your U.S. income on your Canadian return, the income is deemed taxable as Canadian income. The usually lower U.S. income tax rate could leave you with an amount owing for the difference between the United States and Canadian income tax rates.<p>So Canadians pay (some) income tax to the US instead of Canada and the US gives us nothing in return? It feels like those are systems that were put in place with the assumption that earning income in the US would require the use of US resources (ie: living in the US).<p>That’s just a flat out bad deal for Canada and Canadians, right?
Doesn’t that mean the YouTube creator relationship is an employer-employee relationship?<p>If it was company-contractor relationship, payment wouldn’t be taxable<i>, only the contractors surplus.<p>On top of that. How do creators abroad get a tax refund for their expenses?<p></i> says the European who has never done business with the US and doesn’t know what he is saying...
Here the countries with tax treaties with US.<p><a href="https://www.irs.gov/businesses/international-businesses/united-states-income-tax-treaties-a-to-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.irs.gov/businesses/international-businesses/unit...</a>
At first this sounds crazy but the article makes it clearer that really they're talking about taxing revenue earned in the US from US viewers.<p>That's not quite so unreasonable as long as it's reciprocated for US creators operating in foreign markets. i.e. you pay taxes where the viewers are, not (only) where the creator is.<p>If you don't submit any tax details they'll go after your full world wide revenue as they don't know where it was earned, so it will be important to do that.<p>I guess it could all be avoided if YouTube added a feature to allow creators from the rest of the world hide content from US viewers but that's probably not part of their business plan.
So why is it for Youtube content creators ???.<p>If I make money from using AWS and my server is hosted in the US region will I eventually get a taxbill for providing a service to US customers ???.
It's actually not that difficult. Yes you do not want to make any mistakes ($1000 fines) but there are companies who will sort this out.<p>There are plenty of people, myself included who live outside the US and get paid from US earnings with no tax deductions in the US. It helps of course if your country has a withholding treaty like the UK does with the US.