MESSAGE
| DATE | 2021-05-06 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] National Control and Political Freedom in the
|
wsj.com
Opinion | The Corporate Tax and American Sovereignty
Thomas J. Duesterberg
7-9 minutes
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has a grand idea: a global tax regime.
She envisions a minimum corporate tax standardized across the developed
world and expanded authority for nations to tax multinational
corporations. Together with the Biden administration’s plan to raise the
U.S. corporate tax rate to 28% and eliminate preferences, it would
return the U.S. to its pre-2017 status as a high-tax jurisdiction,
discouraging domestic capital investment and production. More insidious,
it would cede authority over taxation, one of the pillars of democratic
governance, to some ill-defined international technocratic body or group
of experts.
Such erosion of sovereign democratic oversight should be recognizable.
It has long characterized Europe and is part and parcel of the European
Union’s ambition to become a global regulatory superpower.
Ms. Yellen’s proposal arises out of the longstanding efforts of major
European nations to extend their taxing power over U.S. technology firms
through so-called digital taxes. Initiatives from France, Austria, Italy
and the U.K. threatened to undermine efforts to harmonize corporate
taxation in the EU and open a new front in a trade war with the U.S.
Given the need for unanimous approval for EU laws and opposition from
Ireland and some Northern European member states, European leaders
shifted the debate to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, or OECD, a group of 37 high-income countries including the U.S.
The initiative expanded quickly to include a minimum corporate tax,
another long-term EU goal that couldn’t be achieved internally or be
effective unless other developed countries participated. In this way,
European leaders sought to reduce tax competition among EU member states
as well as low-tax nations such as the U.S., Switzerland, Singapore and
Bermuda. Since Europe and most other developed countries rely more
heavily on value-added taxes than corporate taxes, raising the latter
would give their firms a cost advantage over U.S. firms, especially
since most of the VATs are refundable for exported products. U.S.
attempts over the years to match such an export advantage have been
stymied by rulings of the World Trade Organization.
The new Biden team is eager to work with Europe on larger questions such
as the China challenge, climate change and reform of the World Trade
Organization. Entering a negotiation on corporate taxes, the thinking
goes, could help secure European cooperation while incidentally
providing domestic political cover for the tax hikes the Biden
administration needs to fund new spending.
If an agreement is reached through the OECD, the administration is
likely to enact it as a “multilateral instrument,” somewhat akin to the
Paris Climate Accord, and avoid submitting it to the Senate as a tax
treaty. A precedent can even be found for this in the OECD’s 2016
Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Related Measures to
Prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting.
This approach would transfer significant national sovereignty over
corporate taxation, key to overall economic policy, to some
yet-to-be-defined international regime under the guidance of the OECD,
an unelected multilateral institution. The EU since its inception has
embraced such transfers of power to avoid the difficulties of achieving
consensus through popular political participation. The WTO, too, has
evolved in the direction of settling disputes and interpreting
agreements through elite consensus and rule by technical experts, which
is one reason the U.S. has been so critical of its operations.
We need to know how far this transfer of authority would extend and what
institution or process would handle disputes and enforcement. Would the
negotiated rules be incorporated automatically into the tax laws of
signatories, much like EU rules have immediate force of law in member
states? If Arizona wants to give tax abatements to a domestic or foreign
semiconductor firm to build a fabrication plant, would it have to get
the approval of OECD experts? Would other nations have a way of
challenging such tax incentives?
The institutions of European integration offer a cautionary note. The EU
now has a Parliament that can’t initiate legislation; a governing
council of national leaders constrained by the modern equivalent of
liberum veto, the unanimity principle; a central bank that pays little
attention to foundational treaties in imposing fiscal policy changes in
nations such as Greece and Italy and in expanding EU debt issuance; a
Court of Justice that operates in secret and issues transformational
rulings divining the “teleological” spirit of founding documents; and an
unelected bureaucracy in the European Commission that proposes
legislation, regulates and distributes funding. These institutions all
suffer from a democratic deficit and a technocratic dominance
antithetical to the Madisonian concept of government.
The WTO has some of the same problems, though not to the same extent.
The U.S. critique of the trade group is based largely on that
institution’s tendency to reinterpret its foundational agreements and
its failure, due to the unanimity principle, to discipline rule-breakers
like mercantilist China or address new areas like digital commerce.
The Biden team should understand the road it is heading down. Its
Covid-relief law and infrastructure bill also ride roughshod over the
federalist system that has nurtured democratic traditions in this
country. Both exploit central government purchasing, spending and
regulatory power to overturn decades of local decisions and state
control over everything from housing and infrastructure permitting to
labor laws. Ceding corporate-taxation authority to an undefined
international authority that will inevitably be controlled by an
unelected technocratic elite would erode Madisonian principles even
further. It would move America closer to the EU model of governance.
Mr. Duesterberg is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He served as
assistant secretary of commerce for international economic policy, 1989-93.
WSJ Opinion: Joe Biden, ‘Union Guy’
Your browser does not support HTML5 video.
0:00 / 3:54
3:20
WSJ Opinion: Joe Biden, ‘Union Guy’
WSJ Opinion: Joe Biden, ‘Union Guy’
Main Street: The president’s labor agenda is the same one he brought to
Washington in 1973. Images: Getty Images/AP Video Composite: Mark Kelly
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
_______________________________________________
Hangout mailing list
Hangout-at-nylxs.com
http://lists.mrbrklyn.com/mailman/listinfo/hangout
|
|
