That's clearly not true. To take just one example, US states all exempt small businesses from dealing with sales tax until they cross a threshold even for foreign businesses. EU does not meaning that if you make even one single sale of even a very cheap thing to a single German or Spanish, you are expected to actually fill out VAT returns in Germany and Spain, regardless of where your company is actually located. Of course this is impossible as they are all in languages you don't speak at minimum, so some countries provide what they call a "mini one stop shop" where for a fee the local government will fill out the tax returns for you. But not everyone selling to Europe has access to such "MOSS" offices, and naturally they don't work for free.
There are also insane rules for working out which country gets to claim a sale. Including for example what to do in cases like someone buying something whilst on a boat.
Obvious solutions like thresholding are not interesting to the EU. Brussels doesn't really care about startups and sees them as a curiosity. If they can extract another few billion from Google or Amazon at the cost of sacrificing millions of startups-to-be across the continent, they will do it in an eyeblink.
> Brussels doesn't really care about startups and sees them as a curiosity.
I think Brussels can be blame for a lot of things but not about NOT wanting to harmonize laws. But the main problem here is that countries dont really want a federation. So Brussels cannot do too much to help startups with taxes. I suspect the problem you so accurately describe with VAT is not that Brussels did not wanted a simple solution but countries insisting to own their own piece of that share according with their own VAT level. Focus here on the words “their own”.
Europe IMO as European citizen is very diverse so they all want somehow to keep everything they have in their own country the same while also making it together. That is hard task. Was hard when globalization spirit was high and it is almost impossible now when we go more into individualism.
