136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate(cnn.com)
cnn.com
136 Countries agree to minimum corporate tax rate
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/08/business/ireland-global-tax-deal-oecd/index.html
67 コメント
The thing is non-harmonization doesn't really promote experimentation, it promotes competitive-market-leading behavior. Obviously there are limits to how much it matters - lots more startups in CA compared to South Dakota. But I don't think there's a lot of evidence that non-harmonization provides an incentive to experiment, so much as it makes countries have economic incentives to treat things like a zero sum game.
Without collective agreements between governing bodies on what bare minimum standards should be on taxation what we see is rent seeking behavior from corporations (ah la Foxconn and Mount Pleasant, Amazon HQ 2).
Without minimum taxation, we see a race to the bottom for taxation, where elites benefit and everyone else looses.
Without minimum taxation, we see a race to the bottom for taxation, where elites benefit and everyone else looses.
By "elites" do you mean the people living in the countries or states that attract capital? Ireland's standard of living has increased dramatically because they adopted low taxation regime. It's ridiculous to pretend that forcing countries that don't have much in the way of resources or infrastructure to adopt higher taxes somehow helps them. This might help the U.S. or Germany keep companies "in house" but it certainly does not help Ireland or similar countries.
This argument is subtly interesting, as it lays bare how regulatory capture of the tax system by corporations has caused unexpected consequences and externalities, and how efforts seeking to even the playing field for smaller corporations and countries ironically benefits those best able to navigate increased regulatory hurdles and scrutiny and higher tax burdens - the status quo elite corporations.
I’m reminded of the (conspiracy?) theory that the recent Facebook whistleblower is a controlled opposition operative who deliberately seeks to increase the regularly burden on Facebook and other social media sites, because Facebook will benefit overall compared to smaller corporations who are not able to iterate and adapt as well.
Is this new tax plan comparable to regulatory capture by large multinational corporations? If so, how does it deal with these concerns?
I’m reminded of the (conspiracy?) theory that the recent Facebook whistleblower is a controlled opposition operative who deliberately seeks to increase the regularly burden on Facebook and other social media sites, because Facebook will benefit overall compared to smaller corporations who are not able to iterate and adapt as well.
Is this new tax plan comparable to regulatory capture by large multinational corporations? If so, how does it deal with these concerns?
This is experimentation in governance. What better way to encourage that than to provide an illustration as these 136 countries are doing?
I think you're in need of some further reading.
1) UN resolutions don't have any enforcement weight, which is why they're so popular with politicians who run on the statement "nothing will fundamentally change."
2) Taxes should be paid by whoever retains earnings, and in that case corporate taxes make a lot of sense. And yes, buying back your own shares to drive share values higher for current shareholders is "retaining earnings" and should be taxed at not just capital gains, but individual income levels since individual income is what such activity creates.
1) UN resolutions don't have any enforcement weight, which is why they're so popular with politicians who run on the statement "nothing will fundamentally change."
2) Taxes should be paid by whoever retains earnings, and in that case corporate taxes make a lot of sense. And yes, buying back your own shares to drive share values higher for current shareholders is "retaining earnings" and should be taxed at not just capital gains, but individual income levels since individual income is what such activity creates.
On #2: Buying back shares does not create individual income. It only creates temporary unrealized gains. Only if those individual shareholders sell, do they realize the gains and, in some cases, will they be taxed on it at income tax rates.
Wrong.
That money is rendered worthless from an economic perspective. In a healthy economy the profits of corporations are spent on more facilities, more suppliers, more employees, who all in turn spend their profits on the same.
We don't have a healthy economy. We have corporations that lose money every single day of their entire existence, but manage to drive their share prices by tax scams, accounting fraud, government subsidies, and share buybacks financed with debt the would not be available to them but for the existence of the scams, frauds, and government subsidies.
In that sense these corporations do not do anything of value, they are merely ephemeral structures to facilitate tax and investment risk avoidance for a certain class of people, at the expense of a tax base they do not participate in so should logically be shut out of.
When a corporation uses that money to buy back shares the money is effectively destroyed by being circulated among a financial class that has (mostly) bribed their way out of the tax system.
Hence, any money used for share buybacks should logically be treated as net income for the company in question's next filing.
That money is rendered worthless from an economic perspective. In a healthy economy the profits of corporations are spent on more facilities, more suppliers, more employees, who all in turn spend their profits on the same.
We don't have a healthy economy. We have corporations that lose money every single day of their entire existence, but manage to drive their share prices by tax scams, accounting fraud, government subsidies, and share buybacks financed with debt the would not be available to them but for the existence of the scams, frauds, and government subsidies.
In that sense these corporations do not do anything of value, they are merely ephemeral structures to facilitate tax and investment risk avoidance for a certain class of people, at the expense of a tax base they do not participate in so should logically be shut out of.
When a corporation uses that money to buy back shares the money is effectively destroyed by being circulated among a financial class that has (mostly) bribed their way out of the tax system.
Hence, any money used for share buybacks should logically be treated as net income for the company in question's next filing.
[deleted]
> In a healthy economy the profits of corporations are spent on more facilities, more suppliers, more employees, who all in turn spend their profits on the same.
Only if those investments will create more profit. If capital cannot be allocated effectively (i.e. a company that returns $1 for every extra dollar invested above current ability) then the profit should be returned to the shareholders.
> We have corporations that lose money every single day of their entire existence, but manage to drive their share prices by tax scams, accounting fraud, government subsidies, and share buybacks financed with debt the would not be available to them but for the existence of the scams, frauds, and government subsidies.
Sure there are companies like this.
> at the expense of a tax base they do not participate in so should logically be shut out of.
I mean, you shouldn't pay taxes if you lose money... Shareholders/employees still pay taxes here.
> When a corporation uses that money to buy back shares the money is effectively destroyed by being circulated among a financial class that has (mostly) bribed their way out of the tax system.
Say we have 100 shares of a company. The company makes $100 per year. Each of those shares own $1 per year of the company. If they company pays $50 to buy back 50 shares then each of the remaining shares owns $2 of that $100. I mean, the market still decides what the stocks are worth, but eventually most if not all stocks get valued fairly. How is the money being destroyed?
Again, if the company cannot invest the money profitably to make more money, it should return it to the owners of the company. Are you against private ownership?
> Hence, any money used for share buybacks should logically be treated as net income for the company in question's next filing.
Why?
Only if those investments will create more profit. If capital cannot be allocated effectively (i.e. a company that returns $1 for every extra dollar invested above current ability) then the profit should be returned to the shareholders.
> We have corporations that lose money every single day of their entire existence, but manage to drive their share prices by tax scams, accounting fraud, government subsidies, and share buybacks financed with debt the would not be available to them but for the existence of the scams, frauds, and government subsidies.
Sure there are companies like this.
> at the expense of a tax base they do not participate in so should logically be shut out of.
I mean, you shouldn't pay taxes if you lose money... Shareholders/employees still pay taxes here.
> When a corporation uses that money to buy back shares the money is effectively destroyed by being circulated among a financial class that has (mostly) bribed their way out of the tax system.
Say we have 100 shares of a company. The company makes $100 per year. Each of those shares own $1 per year of the company. If they company pays $50 to buy back 50 shares then each of the remaining shares owns $2 of that $100. I mean, the market still decides what the stocks are worth, but eventually most if not all stocks get valued fairly. How is the money being destroyed?
Again, if the company cannot invest the money profitably to make more money, it should return it to the owners of the company. Are you against private ownership?
> Hence, any money used for share buybacks should logically be treated as net income for the company in question's next filing.
Why?
Sure. Let's try an experiment where all countries agree to a minimum tax rate, and see what that does.
We've tried race-to-the-bottom. We've tried penalize-till-we-get-hitler. We've tried tickle-down. We've tried fascism-masquerading-as-communism. Let's try globally coordinated minimum tax!
We've tried race-to-the-bottom. We've tried penalize-till-we-get-hitler. We've tried tickle-down. We've tried fascism-masquerading-as-communism. Let's try globally coordinated minimum tax!
Did something happen to cause mutual cooperation between most of the planet to be viewed as a bad thing? All these countries have come to an agreement by negotiation instead of economic or martial war.
Why is there such pessimism/paranoia about this deal in this thread?
Why is there such pessimism/paranoia about this deal in this thread?
Operating under the assumption that most replies are from US citizens: the people of the US have a love/hate relationship with taxes. Most of the time theyre fine with taxing others so that they could reap the benefits, they just dont want to be taxed themselves.
Corporate tax in general is the wrong type of taxation.
Corporate tax can be controlled by the company itself. If you run your business economically, you pay more corporate tax. This is just wrong.
Corporate tax can be controlled by the company itself. If you run your business economically, you pay more corporate tax. This is just wrong.
Yes, but increased profits (by running profitably) also increases returns for the shareholders... A good thing.
But you don't increase profits, what you do is spend that money recklessly on R&D that has a lower ROI than if that money was spent outside the company. However, once taxes are factored in the ROI is better than paying taxes due to an increase in the share price.
So what you incentivize is the misallocation of funds from their most beneficial use outside the organization to something in the organization.
So what you incentivize is the misallocation of funds from their most beneficial use outside the organization to something in the organization.
Profits, if not able to be reallocated for more profit should be return to shareholders.
Taxes should be taken into account in calculating where the best ROI would be here. Obviously it changes when you would return profit to shareholders.
Taxes should be taken into account in calculating where the best ROI would be here. Obviously it changes when you would return profit to shareholders.
My point is that it's a bad tax because it can be controlled and at the same time corporate tax controls the business decisions. This should not be the case in my opinion. Think about it. I think it would be better to focus on sales tax. Also, it would make tax rules much easier to understand.
You, the consumer, pay the corporate tax.
When people talk about the "corporate tax", they're talking about the tax on corporate profits, which belong to the shareholders. You could theoretically tax the shareholders directly instead when they receive those profits as dividends etc (and there might be some advantage to doing so - it's more clear which country taxes should be paid in, and you can have a lower dividend tax rate for people with low incomes).
There's no reason for a company to raise consumer prices in response to a change in the corporate tax rate - if a company can make more profits just by raising prices, they should do so anyway regardless of what the tax rate is.
There's no reason for a company to raise consumer prices in response to a change in the corporate tax rate - if a company can make more profits just by raising prices, they should do so anyway regardless of what the tax rate is.
That's true - but taxes *always* disincentivize the thing being taxed. If investment in a company is less profitable under taxation than it otherwise would be, there will be less investment in that company, no exceptions. Now the size of that effect is quite likely to be negligible for the companies in question here. But it's at least theoretically possible that taxing corporate profits could lead to a change in the marketplace, including market dropout, that might actually lead to consumers paying higher prices to the remaining members of a market with reduced competition.
Further, if all companies in an already low-competition marketplace are equally affected by the tax, then it's quite possible for all of them to ~simultaneously raise prices to offset the tax, with or without explicitly illegal coordination, knowing that the others will follow suit.
Further, if all companies in an already low-competition marketplace are equally affected by the tax, then it's quite possible for all of them to ~simultaneously raise prices to offset the tax, with or without explicitly illegal coordination, knowing that the others will follow suit.
Sure, there are definitely second and third order effects. Taxing shareholders may reduce the incomes of wealthy people, who have a higher savings rate, leading to a reduced national savings rate, higher interest rates and lower asset prices, which could cause some businesses to decide against doing certain investments that wouldn't have a high enough return (relative to the interest rate on that capital).
Since everything is tied together it's hard to reason through all of this. For companies making investment decisions the interest rate will obviously be one factor, but projected consumer demand will be another, and it's easy to imagine in some cases higher middle-class incomes and consumer demand might be more important than a lower interest rate for decisions around building new factories etc.
Obviously it's complex and I don't have a strongly-held opinion. But taking a historical perspective interest rates are near record lows and financial asset prices are at record highs. On those grounds policies that might nudge us back a little into where the economy has been operating for the past 50 years (regarding interest rates etc) seem less risky than ones that push us further away from our post-WWII historical experience.
Since everything is tied together it's hard to reason through all of this. For companies making investment decisions the interest rate will obviously be one factor, but projected consumer demand will be another, and it's easy to imagine in some cases higher middle-class incomes and consumer demand might be more important than a lower interest rate for decisions around building new factories etc.
Obviously it's complex and I don't have a strongly-held opinion. But taking a historical perspective interest rates are near record lows and financial asset prices are at record highs. On those grounds policies that might nudge us back a little into where the economy has been operating for the past 50 years (regarding interest rates etc) seem less risky than ones that push us further away from our post-WWII historical experience.
Nope, the tax is paid on the profit (i.e. post consumer).
Personally, I'm a strong believer that decentralized systems are more robust than any centralized or distributed alternative. I see no reason why geopolitics would differ from software in this case. In fact, the most effective use case for decentralized software occurs when centralized (geo)political governance creates friction or reduces optionality. For examples, see Napster, Bitcoin, Tor, etc. – their decentralization provides robustness against failure modes created by centralized governance and regulatory capture.
So if the principles of software and politics are already so closely aligned, isn't it reasonable to assume that 136 independent governing bodies would be more robust than one?
So if the principles of software and politics are already so closely aligned, isn't it reasonable to assume that 136 independent governing bodies would be more robust than one?
Globalism is inherently fragile. This is part of a continued trend which has enough inertia to carry us to an inflection point where it could conceivably destroy everything human, either in real terms or something less tractable. We made a wrong turn a very long time ago, and since we've been extraordinarily misdirected but inextricably committed to the mistake we've made. We're totally in the dark, and truth becomes ever more indefinite as we travel down this timeline and the path we [never] elected.
You see, the way that we made exchange was translated from a moral domain to a material domain, which was finally transposed to a symbolic one. Dollar valuations of a lifetimes is an intrinsically abhorrent concept. A life can never be repaid, thus it can never be valued in real terms - yet it is, billions of times over. Globalism is just a long-range result of this. Exploitation and undervaluing of billions of lives in order to create increasingly competitive products to grow dollar values of a investments in the hands of an increasingly small proportion of the population. This itself founded on false pretense.
Every move towards globalism is increasingly dangerous, this is no exception.
You see, the way that we made exchange was translated from a moral domain to a material domain, which was finally transposed to a symbolic one. Dollar valuations of a lifetimes is an intrinsically abhorrent concept. A life can never be repaid, thus it can never be valued in real terms - yet it is, billions of times over. Globalism is just a long-range result of this. Exploitation and undervaluing of billions of lives in order to create increasingly competitive products to grow dollar values of a investments in the hands of an increasingly small proportion of the population. This itself founded on false pretense.
Every move towards globalism is increasingly dangerous, this is no exception.
This is a lot of doomsaying, with no evidence and very little details or logic. It's like you expect your reader to already agree with you and nod along to "mistake" and "misdirected" and all the other negative language you use without any explanation of what you're actually talking about.
> We made a wrong turn a very long time ago
What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that. Otherwise: what are you talking about?
> translated from a moral domain to a material domain, which was finally transposed to a symbolic one.
What? Can you explain what this is supposed to mean?
> We made a wrong turn a very long time ago
What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that. Otherwise: what are you talking about?
> translated from a moral domain to a material domain, which was finally transposed to a symbolic one.
What? Can you explain what this is supposed to mean?
I don't understand the comment you replied to either. To my naive mind it sounds like a lot of words put together to make it look like something deep, but that doesn't actually mean something. It'd be happy to be showed wrong here with historical events to describe "the wrong" turns and such to be able to tell if it's not just a abstraction or feelings that went a bit to far.
Could it be a lot of words to describe an interpretation of globalization as a perceived single point of failure across every subsection of civilization/humanity?
Could it be a lot of words to describe an interpretation of globalization as a perceived single point of failure across every subsection of civilization/humanity?
>> We made a wrong turn a very long time ago
> What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that.
Are there really people who believe that? I've only read it in Sapiens by YN Harari, and it sounded like a ridiculous idea written to provoke thought, not an actual opinion. "Yes, hunter-gatherers could starve on a bad year, and they sometimes got eaten by tigers, but look at how un-alienated they were!"
The author probably wouldn't have been to write his book or share these thoughts to more than 30 people without the invention of agriculture...
> What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that.
Are there really people who believe that? I've only read it in Sapiens by YN Harari, and it sounded like a ridiculous idea written to provoke thought, not an actual opinion. "Yes, hunter-gatherers could starve on a bad year, and they sometimes got eaten by tigers, but look at how un-alienated they were!"
The author probably wouldn't have been to write his book or share these thoughts to more than 30 people without the invention of agriculture...
> I've only read it in Sapiens by YN Harari, and it sounded like a ridiculous idea written to provoke thought, not an actual opinion. "Yes, hunter-gatherers could starve on a bad year, and they sometimes got eaten by tigers, but look at how un-alienated they were!"
The argument I saw put more emphasis on things like nutritional deficiencies after the switch [1], reflected in average male height going from 5'9" to 5'3". Obviously in the long run agriculture became very efficient, but he makes a reasonable case that in the short run individual quality of life went downhill, with the main advantage being reaching higher population densities before being at the limit of the food supply, and so winning any conflicts with hunter-gatherer societies.
[1] http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
The argument I saw put more emphasis on things like nutritional deficiencies after the switch [1], reflected in average male height going from 5'9" to 5'3". Obviously in the long run agriculture became very efficient, but he makes a reasonable case that in the short run individual quality of life went downhill, with the main advantage being reaching higher population densities before being at the limit of the food supply, and so winning any conflicts with hunter-gatherer societies.
[1] http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
The idea, at least as I’ve seen it a number of places, wasn’t that agriculture was a long-run bad idea, but that for a very long time it decreased the median quality of life (while also greatly reducing volatility in the quality of life for most people, and enabling extraordinary improvements in the quality of life for – again, for a very long time – an extremely narrow elite.)
I am as confused as you are; this reads almost like GPT-3 generated text - there are words that resolve to sentences, it scans like real human writing, but there's little to no information communicated.
The breakdown is basically:
* A statement of the premise: "Globalism is bad" without defining 'globalism'.
* Some vague ominous sentences that sound like they reinforce the premise but don't.
* A long paragraph that basically makes the statement "Human lives can't be assigned a dollar value" with no real attempt to tie it to the premise.
* Restatement of the premise.
The breakdown is basically:
* A statement of the premise: "Globalism is bad" without defining 'globalism'.
* Some vague ominous sentences that sound like they reinforce the premise but don't.
* A long paragraph that basically makes the statement "Human lives can't be assigned a dollar value" with no real attempt to tie it to the premise.
* Restatement of the premise.
What you just wrote is a lot of verbal diarrhea without any examples or backing at all.
> Globalism is inherently fragile
> Every move towards globalism is increasingly dangerous, this is no exception.
I don’t really agree in the slightest unless you’re making the claim that all political systems above the family level are inherently fragile in which case it’s a moot point. The previous international standard was war when there were major disagreements. Globalism has helped make the entire planet relatively(relative is doing a lot of heavy lifting here but still counts) peaceful compared to the past
I don’t really agree in the slightest unless you’re making the claim that all political systems above the family level are inherently fragile in which case it’s a moot point. The previous international standard was war when there were major disagreements. Globalism has helped make the entire planet relatively(relative is doing a lot of heavy lifting here but still counts) peaceful compared to the past
Sounds good, a tax race to the bottom hurts many more counries than it helps, it's a negative sum game.
What's the previous % been so far in major western counries, anyone got a link?
What's the previous % been so far in major western counries, anyone got a link?
US: 21%
China: 15%/25%
Japan: 29.74%
Germany: 29.65%
UK: 19%
France: 26.5%
India: 15%/22%
Italy: 27.9%
Countries with two values listed have different rates for different types of companies e.g. China has a lower rate for “high-tech” companies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
China: 15%/25%
Japan: 29.74%
Germany: 29.65%
UK: 19%
France: 26.5%
India: 15%/22%
Italy: 27.9%
Countries with two values listed have different rates for different types of companies e.g. China has a lower rate for “high-tech” companies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
That makes this sound more like a corporate win - 15 % is already the lowest one, and this agreement can be used as a way to wiggle out from something more useful, like revenue tax or VAT.
These countries were not the problem cases. If you compare it with Ireland however :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Repub...
"Ireland's "headline" corporation tax rate is 12.5%, however, foreign multinationals pay an aggregate § Effective tax rate (ETR) of 2.2–4.5% on global profits "shifted" to Ireland, via Ireland's global network of bilateral tax treaties."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Repub...
"Ireland's "headline" corporation tax rate is 12.5%, however, foreign multinationals pay an aggregate § Effective tax rate (ETR) of 2.2–4.5% on global profits "shifted" to Ireland, via Ireland's global network of bilateral tax treaties."
I think the tech companies will keep their headquarters in Ireland even after this - Ireland is still not going to raise it's corporate tax rate above 15%, there's inertia, and Ireland is now the only native English-speaking country in the EU (except maybe for Malta).
The greater impact of the agreement as I understand it will come from the requirement for companies to pay taxes in the countries where they do business, and not just in the country of registration.
Whenever some one visits Hacker News, where is Ycombinator "doing business" from? The country where the visitor is located? The country where the Hacker News moderators/programmers are located? The country where Ycombinator is headquartered? The location of the Hacker News servers? The location of the advertisers on HackerNews? If each country makes up their own tax rules to determine where Ycombinator is doing business, then a company may have to pay 200% of their total revenue in taxes to cover all the different locations that could claim business was being conducted there.
I think there is a single entity that determines allocation. Details TBD. It’s a one liner in the following doc;
https://www.oecd.org/tax/beps/statement-on-a-two-pillar-solu...
https://www.oecd.org/tax/beps/statement-on-a-two-pillar-solu...
I just now read that... a lot of details to be worked out, and lot of opportunity for this to fail long before implementation.
It’s a back door federalization. Members will have to conform to additional TBD rules or put their tax allocation at risk.
I would be surprised if double taxation was not addressed or considered.
> I think the tech companies will keep their headquarters in Ireland even after this
I agree they probably won't leave. Ireland is cheap for labour as well. (It has/had one of Google's lowest salary levels, for instance.)
However, it will make new companies question moving there. I was in Ireland when Brexit was becoming a reality. My guess was that Fintechs would flee London into Dublin, but it looked like many went to Amsterdam. English is fairly widespread in continental Europe now.
Even Switzerland (which already has four national/federation languages, depending on region) is slowly moving towards English as second language.
I agree they probably won't leave. Ireland is cheap for labour as well. (It has/had one of Google's lowest salary levels, for instance.)
However, it will make new companies question moving there. I was in Ireland when Brexit was becoming a reality. My guess was that Fintechs would flee London into Dublin, but it looked like many went to Amsterdam. English is fairly widespread in continental Europe now.
Even Switzerland (which already has four national/federation languages, depending on region) is slowly moving towards English as second language.
Is the language barrier really an issue when you have nations like Germany where half the population speaks english? When you consider knowledge worker germans I wouldn't be surprised if this jumps up to U.S. proportions where 78% of the population speaks english.
On one level, this is a good thing as there has been a race to the bottom going on in terms of taxes for some time.
But on another level, this is very bad because national tax policy is now being set by unelected diplomats instead of congress. It's an ominous admission that western democracy is now unable to operate as it's meant to and set policy in a way that reflects the desires and interests of the citizens.
I know that worrying about national sovereignty is usually a right wing thing, but there is some truth to it- when the economy is international the bodies with the most power are the international economic agencies and banks. For example it's well known that Greek government policy after the financial crisis was dictated to them by the European Central Bank and the IMF. Likewise the World Bank and the IMF set policy for a large swath of the global south. And none of those people are elected.
But on another level, this is very bad because national tax policy is now being set by unelected diplomats instead of congress. It's an ominous admission that western democracy is now unable to operate as it's meant to and set policy in a way that reflects the desires and interests of the citizens.
I know that worrying about national sovereignty is usually a right wing thing, but there is some truth to it- when the economy is international the bodies with the most power are the international economic agencies and banks. For example it's well known that Greek government policy after the financial crisis was dictated to them by the European Central Bank and the IMF. Likewise the World Bank and the IMF set policy for a large swath of the global south. And none of those people are elected.
> It's an ominous admission that western democracy is now unable to operate as it's meant to and set policy in a way that reflects the desires and interests of the citizens.
That comes off as a little hyperbolic to me. Those governments are supposedly already taking choices they feel reflect the desires and interests of their citizens which means entering into this tax agreement is such a reflection.
There’s no world government enforcing that states remain a member of this agreement so they can always leave them later if their citizens feel that way as well.
It’s not like this was done entirely out of altruism from states looking out for their fellow man. Nation states are pretty nakedly self interested hence the phrase “nations have no friends only interests”. They all must feel they are getting something from the deal
That comes off as a little hyperbolic to me. Those governments are supposedly already taking choices they feel reflect the desires and interests of their citizens which means entering into this tax agreement is such a reflection.
There’s no world government enforcing that states remain a member of this agreement so they can always leave them later if their citizens feel that way as well.
It’s not like this was done entirely out of altruism from states looking out for their fellow man. Nation states are pretty nakedly self interested hence the phrase “nations have no friends only interests”. They all must feel they are getting something from the deal
> tax policy is now being set by unelected diplomats instead of congress.
Each nation will have to ratify the agreement.
It is nominally true that congress sets tax policy, though that overlooks the golden horde of lobbyists that descend upon Congress with ready-made bills. It is also true that a representative or senator ought to make decisions based on the best interests of their constituents, rather than donors and their lobbyist pals (who might land them a lucrative gig after office).
Each nation will have to ratify the agreement.
It is nominally true that congress sets tax policy, though that overlooks the golden horde of lobbyists that descend upon Congress with ready-made bills. It is also true that a representative or senator ought to make decisions based on the best interests of their constituents, rather than donors and their lobbyist pals (who might land them a lucrative gig after office).
It could be worse; they could have taken over via conquest (war).
“ I know that worrying about national sovereignty is usually a right wing thing”
is that an apology for considering a right wing idea seriously?
is that an apology for considering a right wing idea seriously?
Well, the nation as an organizing principle and identity arose in revolutionary France as a way to fill the hole left by the collapse of god and the king as the feudal system was abolished. But the nation, too, as a concept has its limits. In some cases I think it will be replaced with more local identifications and political structures; in other cases more global ones. But in every case those structures need to be democratic.
[deleted]
Sounds like a cartel.
Cartels are entirely legal on the international stage. See OPEC as a clear example.
I still think it would be better to not have any corporate taxes at all. If corporations have to pay taxes they also want to have a say in politics. But that leads to all these corporate friendly but human unfriendly decisions. Instead if you agree a state should do what is good for it’s people only people should be allowed to pay taxes.
Step 1) global harmonization of trade
Step 2) common monetary system
Step 3) global harmonization of tax structure
Step 3) one global government (similar to EU)
Is that a good thing or a bad thing ?
Yes.
Step 2) common monetary system
Step 3) global harmonization of tax structure
Step 3) one global government (similar to EU)
Is that a good thing or a bad thing ?
Yes.
Not really "global", but mostly "western", I'd say.
What are the upsides of homogenization? Efficiency and predictability when all goes well.
What are the downsides of homogenization? Lack of innovation and fragility when everything stops going all that well.
What are the upsides of homogenization? Efficiency and predictability when all goes well.
What are the downsides of homogenization? Lack of innovation and fragility when everything stops going all that well.
as long as Americans don’t go mad and get another crazy elected
I think that is kinda forgone now... How many of them do they now have in row? Going back to at least Clinton, maybe further...
there's what's written, and then there's what's done.
We should be encouraging experimentation in governance.
It's the same how inflation doesn't just devalue the currency, it encourages riskier behavior because investors must seek higher returns.