John Galt Tells Oregon Politicians to Screw Off

The Oregon Ducks will compete for the national championship early next month, so they’ve had a good season. Unfortunately, Oregon’s government isn’t doing nearly so well. Politicians approved a big tax hike on those bad, evil rich people in 2009, and Oregon’s spite-filled voters approved that measure earlier this year.

So how’s is Oregon’s class-warfare approach working? Not surprisingly, the politics of hate and envy is generating poor results. Revenues are much lower than forecast, as anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the Laffer Curve could have explained. The most noteworthy result is that about one-fourth of rich taxpayers have disappeared. Does the name John Galt ring a bell?

None of this should be a surprise. Maryland politicians tried to rape rich taxpayers a couple of years ago and they also crashed on the Laffer Curve.

As the Wall Street Journal opines, Oregon politicians are getting just what they deserve.

In 2009 the state legislature raised the tax rate to 10.8% on joint-filer income of between $250,000 and $500,000, and to 11% on income above $500,000. Only New York City’s rate is higher. Oregon’s liberal voters ratified the tax increase on individuals and another on businesses in January of this year, no doubt feeling good about their “shared sacrifice.” Congratulations. Instead of $180 million collected last year from the new tax, the state received $130 million. The Eugene Register-Guard newspaper reports that after the tax was raised “income tax and other revenue collections began plunging so steeply that any gains from the two measures seemed trivial.” One reason revenues are so low is that about one-quarter of the rich tax filers seem to have gone missing. The state expected 38,000 Oregonians to pay the higher tax, but only 28,000 did. Funny how that always happens. …The tax wasn’t enacted into law until June 2009 but was retroactively applied to January 1, 2009. So for the first half of the year wealthy Oregon residents weren’t able to take steps to avoid the tax ambush because they didn’t see it coming. This suggests that a bigger revenue loss from tax mitigation strategies will show up on tax return data in 2010 and 2011. …All of this is an instant replay of what happened in Maryland in 2008 when the legislature in Annapolis instituted a millionaire tax. There roughly one-third of the state’s millionaire households vanished from the tax rolls after rates went up. If Salem officials want to find where the millionaires went, they might start the search in Texas, the state that leads the nation in job creation—and has a top income and capital gains tax rate 11 percentage points lower than Oregon’s.

Welcome Instapundit readers. Your comments are greatly appreciated, particularly your real-world stories from your respective states.

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America’s Number One! America’s Number One!…Oops, Never Mind

Sometimes it’s not a good idea to be at the top of a list. And now that Japan has announced a five-percentage point reduction in its corporate tax rate, the United States will have the dubious honor of imposing the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate. Here’s an excerpt from the report in the New York Times.

Japan will cut its corporate income tax rate by 5 percentage points in a bid to shore up its sluggish economy, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said here Monday evening.Companies have urged the government to lower the country’s effective corporate tax rate — which now stands at 40 percent, around the same rate as that in the United States — to stimulate investment in Japan and to encourage businesses to create more jobs. Lowering the corporate tax burden by 5 percentage points could increase Japan’s gross domestic product by 2.6 percentage points, or 14.4 trillion yen ($172 billion), over the next three years, according to estimates by Japan’s Trade Ministry. …In a survey of nearly 23,000 companies published this month by the credit research firm Teikoku Data Bank, more than 44 percent of respondents cited lower corporate taxes as a prerequisite to stronger economic growth in Japan. …A 5 percentage-point tax rate cut is unlikely to do much to solve Japan’s woes, however. An effective corporate tax rate of 35 percent would still be higher than South Korea’s 24 percent or Germany’s 29 percent, for example. …Meanwhile, the government is trying to offset lost tax revenue with tax increases elsewhere, which could blunt the effect of reduced corporate tax burdens.

I suspect the Japanese government’s estimate of $172 billion of additional output is overly generous. After all, the corporate tax rate in Japan will still be very high (the government originally was considering a bigger cut). And foolish Japanese politicians will probably raise taxes elsewhere. But there will be some additional growth since the corporate tax rate is an especially damaging way to collect revenue.

But I’m not losing sleep about Japan’s economic future. I hope they do well, of course, but my bigger concern is the American economy. The U.S. corporate tax rate of nearly 40 percent (including state corporate burdens) already is far too high, particularly since America adds to the competitive disadvantage of U.S.-domiciled firms by being one of the few nations to impose an extra layer of tax on foreign-source income. Japan’s proposed rate reduction, however,  means the high tax rate in America will be an even bigger hindrance to job creation.

It’s also worth noting that the average corporate tax rate in Europe has now dropped to less than 24 percent, so even welfare states have figured out that a high tax burden on business doesn’t make sense in a competitive global economy.

Sometimes you can fall farther behind if you stand still and everyone else moves forward. That’s a good description of what’s happening in the battle for a pro-growth corporate tax system. By doing nothing, America’s self-destructive corporate tax system is becoming, well, even more destructive.

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If We Value Liberty and Prosperity, We Better Defend Tax Competition and Fight for Fiscal Sovereignty

Regular readers know that I am a tireless advocate for tax competition, which exists when governments are encouraged to adopt better tax policy in order to attract/retain jobs and investment. In other words, I want governments to compete with each other because that leads to better policy, just as we get better results as consumers when banks, pet stores, hairdressers, and grocery stores compete with each other.

There is powerful evidence that tax competition has generated very good results in the past 30 years. Top personal income tax rates averaged more than 67 percent back in 1980, but thanks in large part to tax competition, the average top tax rate on individuals has fallen to about 41 percent. Corporate tax rates also have dropped dramatically, from an average of around 48 percent (this data is not as easy to pin down) in 1980 to 25 percent today. And we now have more than 30 flat tax nations today, compared to just 3 in 1980.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that greedy politicians don’t like being constrained by tax competition. Politicians didn’t lower tax rates because they wanted to. They only made their tax systems better because they were afraid that jobs and investment would escape to lower-tax jurisdictions. They resent the fact that tax competition makes it hard to engage in class-warfare tax policy.

That’s why many of these politicians are seeking to replace tax competition with some sort of tax cartel. They want to impose rules on the entire world that will make it hard for taxpayers to benefit from better tax policy in another jurisdiction. In effect, they want some form of tax harmonization, which would create an “OPEC for politicians.” And just as the real OPEC extracts more money from energy consumers, a tax cartel would grab more money from taxpayers.

One aspect of this battle is the way proponents of higher taxes try to demonize so-called tax havens. Many of these jurisdictions are very small, but the smart ones nonetheless defend themselves against the attacks coming from the world’s major welfare states. Here’s a good example. Tony Travers of Cayman Finance, the association representing the financial services industry in the Cayman Islands, recently spoke about the left’s campaign against low-tax jurisdictions.

Travers said he believed the widespread negativity was part of well organised and powerful public relations campaigns driven by onshore Treasury, and supranational and domestic regulatory bodies. British politicians such as Emma Reynolds and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and even US President Barack Obama were, he said, examples of politicians that were “blame deflecting … and anxious to obfuscate the failures of their domestic regulatory systems … by suggesting that in some way it is the tax or regulatory system of the offshore financial centre that is at fault.” He claimed the problems they were trying to conceal by their demonisation of offshore centres had their source onshore. He described various socialist activist movements, such as the trade unions, major charities such as Oxfam, and Travers arch nemesis, Richard Murphy of the Tax Justice Network as the “Tax Taliban” .

This fight is occurring at all levels. A new scholarly study from the Instituto Bruno Leoni in Italy digs into the academic debate about tax competition. Written by Dalibor Rohác of London’s Legatum Institute, the report debunks the argument that tax competition somehow is economically inefficient.

The first common argument is that tax competition distorts the allocation of mobile factors of production across countries. The second argument recurrent in the literature says that tax competition can reduce tax revenue and endanger the stability of public finances. The troublesome feature of both of these arguments is that they start from the assumption of government benevolence and omniscience. For instance, the first argument presupposes that the initial allocation of capital between the two countries was optimal and that tax competition is driving it away from the optimum. Likewise, the second argument implicitly assumes that the initial amount raised in taxes corresponded to some well-defined social optimum and therefore that tax competition drives revenue below that optimal level. Hence neither of these arguments holds in the light of basic public choice theory which convincingly demonstrates that governments do have a tendency to overspend and overtax.

Rohác cleverly exposes the other side’s statist agenda. He explains that their main argument is based on the idea that different tax rates in different nations will lead to an inefficient allocation of investment. He then points out that there is a pro-growth way and an anti-growth way of dealing with this supposed problem.

…if the problem of capital misallocation is caused by differences in tax rates among countries, than introducing a maximal rate is a solution that would be equally appropriate. …tax competition might well offer a solution to the alleged problem of misallocation of capital caused by tax differentials. If tax competition was a “race to the bottom,” then the final outcome would actually be a tax rate harmonized across countries and harmonized at a rate of zero per cent, thus eliminating capital tax distortions altogether.

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We Should Copy the Clever British Campaign against Higher Capital Gains Tax Rates

Here are a handful of the posters being used in the United Kingdom to fight the perversely-destructive proposal to increase tax rates on capital gains. (for an explanation of why the tax should be abolished, see here)

Which one is your favorite? I’m partial to the last one because of my interest in tax competition.

By the way, “CGT” is capital gains tax, and “Vince” and “Cable” refers to Vince Cable, one of the politicians pushing this punitive class-warfare scheme.

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More Corporate Tax Cutting in Europe while America Lags

By every possible metric, one would expect corporate tax rates to be higher in Europe. The burden of government spending is higher across the Atlantic, so that presumably would lead to pressure for a higher corporate tax rate. The affinity for class warfare and anti-business policies is more pronounced in Europe, so that should mean more punitive policies in the Old World.

Yet the corporate tax rate is Europe has now dropped, on average, to less than 25 percent, and the American corporate tax remains at more than 39 percent (including the average of state tax burdens). The latest development in Europe, according to Tax-news.com, is that the Netherlands is reducing its rate to 25 percent.

Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager has unveiled key details of the country’s 2011 tax plan, containing a number of fiscal measures designed to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation… The 2011 tax plan includes plans to reduce corporation tax in 2011 to 25%. The government also plans to make permanent the reduced rate 20% corporate tax rate on the first EUR200,000 in profit, announced last year and retroactive to 2008. In addition, companies will significantly benefit from the extension by one year of the temporary three-year loss carry-back facility (previously losses could be carried back for just one year) as well as the extension of the temporary accelerated depreciation scheme, which allows certain capital assets to be depreciated at 50% per year, to investments made in 2011 as well as those made in 2009 and 2010.

So why is Europe moving in the right direction on this issue and America lagging? The simple (and accurate) answer is tax competition. Governments are lowering tax rates because politicians think that is their only option if they want to attract jobs and investment. Europe’s economies are so interconnected and cross-border mobility of jobs and investment is so large that politicians are being forced to do the right thing, even though all their normal impulses are the opposite. This video explains, followed by a video showing why corporate tax rates should be lower.

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David Cameron’s Foolish (or Cynical) Naivete about the Laffer Curve

Even though he’s allowing the budget to grow twice as fast as inflation, some people seem to think the new U.K. Prime Minster is a fiscal conservative. I’m skeptical. Not only is spending rising much too fast (there are promises of more restraint in the future, but I’ll believe it when it happens), but Cameron and the Tory/Liberal coalition government are increasing the value-added tax and increasing the capital gains tax. Perhaps worst of all, they are leaving in place the new 50 percent tax rate that former Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown imposed in hopes that class-warfare policy would help him get elected. But as this Daily Telegraph story suggests, it is quite likely that the higher tax rate will lose revenue as productive people escape to Switzerland and other jurisdictions not influenced by the politics of hate and envy.

One-in-four hedge fund employees has already left London to move to Switzerland, which is said to have a more stable tax regime, according to consultancy Kinetic partners. Calculations by the company claim the UK could have already forgone about £500m in tax revenues, based on the 1,000 or so hedge fund managers it says have already left the country. …High-profile departures this year include Alan Howard, founder of Brevan Howard, and Mike Platt, founder of BlueCrest Capital.

This story shows both the power of the Laffer Curve and the importance of tax competition. The greedy politicians in England doubtlessly resent the “brain drain” to Switzerland. Like their U.S. counterparts, politicians view taxpayers as serfs who are supposed to blindly produce more income for the ruling class to expropriate and redistribute.

 

While I’m obviously not a big fan of British fiscal policy, America is worse in one important way. At least British taxpayers have the liberty to leave without being raped by the U.K. tax authority. Once they leave the United Kingdom and make their home in Switzerland, they are no longer British taxpayers. Americans who want to move, by contrast, are unable to escape the punitive internal revenue code. Indeed, the United States is one of the few nations in the world to have exit taxes, an odious approach generally associated with loathsome regimes such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

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Halfway Around the World, Fighting for Freedom, Low Taxes, and Sovereignty

I’m in Singapore for two days to help fight the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a statist international bureaucracy based in Paris. The OECD has something called a global tax forum, the purpose of which is to harass so-called tax haven in hopes of coercing them into acting as tax collectors for Europe’s decrepit welfare states. Here’s the executive summary from the memo I wrote, which warns low-tax jurisdictions that the OECD may push even harder to undermine fiscal sovereignty because of fears that a GOP takeover of Congress will make it more difficult to push for tax harmonization policies in the future.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has an ongoing project to prop up Europe’s inefficient welfare states by attacking tax competition in hopes of enabling governments to impose heavier tax burdens. This project received a boost when the Obama Administration joined forces with countries such as France and Germany, but the tide is now turning against high-tax nations – particularly as more people understand that such an approach inevitably leads to Greek-style fiscal collapse. Looming political changes in the United States will further complicate the OECD’s ability to impose bad policy. Because of these developments, low-tax jurisdictions should be especially wary of schemes to rush through new anti-tax competition initiatives at the Singapore Global Forum.

The good news is that nothing dramatic took place on the first day of the two-day conference. the OECD continued to bully low-tax jurisdictions to sign information-sharing agreements and the low-tax jurisdictions kept asking for double-taxation agreements so they could get some benefit in exchange for weakening their human rights/financial privacy laws. The OECD and high-tax nations have been ignoring these requests for a two-way street, thus continuing their bad-faith behavior.

For more information on this issue, here’s a link to my video on tax competition, and here are a handful of TV appearances where I discuss the issue. This is a challenging issue to debate, so I’d welcome feedback on which arguments you think are most effective.

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Every Patriotic American Should Support the President

I wish the title of this blog post referred to the President of the United States, but instead our praise is directed across the Atlantic, to the President of the Czech Republic, who wisely has warned against giving “global governance” powers to the international bureaucrats at the United Nations. President Vaclav Klaus is a great man, who has battled against immense odds to preserve national sovereignty, resisting statist initiatives such as the new EU Constitution (aka, the Lisbon Treaty) and global warming schemes. Klaus understands that international bureaucracies are staffed by leftist ideologues who reflexively distrust markets. Equally important, he recognizes that governments will use “global governance” as a scheme to create tax and regulatory cartels that inevitably expand the burden of government and reduce competition among nations. Here’s a Reuters report on the strong speech Klaus gave to the kleptocrats at the United Nations.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus on Saturday criticized U.N. calls for increased “global governance” of the world’s economy, saying the world body should leave that role to national governments. The solution to dealing with the global economic crisis, Klaus told the U.N. General Assembly, did not lie in “creating new governmental and supranational agencies, or in aiming at global governance of the world economy.” “On the contrary, this is the time for international organizations, including the United Nations, to reduce their expenditures, make their administrations thinner, and leave the solutions to the governments of member states,” he said. …Klaus, a free-market economist who oversaw a wave of privatization in the 1990s after communism collapsed in his homeland, also said the world was “moving in the wrong direction” in combating the economic crisis. “The anti-crisis measures that have been proposed and already partly implemented follow from the assumption that the crisis was a failure of markets and that the right way out is more regulation of markets,” he said. Klaus said that was a “mistaken assumption” and it was impossible to prevent future crises through regulatory interventions and similar actions by governments. That will only “destroy the markets and together with them the chances for economic growth and prosperity in both developed and developing countries,” he said.

A couple of years ago, I had the honor of introducing Klaus at a conference in France. Very rarely do I meet a politician that exudes philosophical integrity. Klaus was one of those unusual cases. And if you want to know why it is important to preserve jurisdictional competition, here is a video on the specific issue of tax competition. This is rather timely since I leave tomorrow for Singapore, where I will be doing everything I can to undermine the pampered bureaucrats at the OECD and their sinister plans to create a global tax cartel to prop up Europe’s inefficient welfare states.

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Crocodile Dundee vs Australia’s Tax Police

Here’s a Reuters story about the Australian Tax Office harassing Paul Hogan, better known to Americans as Crocodile Dundee, because of a tax dispute. The grinches at the tax office took advantage of Hogan’s return for his mother’s funeral to hold him hostage, refusing to let him leave the country until he coughs up some cash. It appears that the tax police in Australia are just as politicized and above the law as the IRS. Hogan has never been charged with tax evasion and there are plenty of signs that the bureaucrats want to make him a high-profile victim to justify the amount of money that has been squandered in a probe of supposed offshore evasion.

Actor Paul Hogan, star of the “Crocodile Dundee” movies, has vowed to continue fighting the Australian tax office which has barred him from leaving Australia until he pays a massive bill, saying he’s victim of a witch hunt. Hogan, 70, was served with a departure prohibition order 10 days ago while in Australia to attend his 101-year-old mother’s funeral which has prevented him from leaving to return to Los Angeles where he lives with his wife and son. The Australian Tax Office refused to comment on reports of seeking tax on A$38 million ($34 million) of allegedly undeclared income from Hogan, saying it cannot give details of individual taxpayers. But the actor went public in the Australian media this week to put forward his side in his five-year row with the tax office, saying he had done nothing wrong and the tax office was on a witch hunt for a high-profile case. …”If I was a tax evader, which I’m not, I must be the dumbest one in the world to keep coming back here instead of fleeing to a tax haven … I know they’re absolutely desperate to nail some high-profile character with money to justify the expense to the taxpayer.” Hogan, who was once a painter on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, is under investigation as part of Australia’s biggest probe into offshore tax evasion, Operation Wickenby. The operation is budgeted to cost at least $300 million. The tax office has claimed he put tens of millions of dollars in film royalties in offshore tax havens, a claim that he has denied. He has never been charged with tax evasion.

This story is symbolic of a bigger issue, which is the the unfortunate tendency of governments to create ever-more oppressive and misguided laws in response to failures of existing policy. We see this in the failed War on Drugs, which leads to trampling of civil liberties and erosion of privacy. We see it in the failed War on Poverty, which leads to more redistribution that further traps people in dependency. We see it in the failed government-run education system, which wastes more money every year as outcomes remain stagnant and children from poor and minority communities suffer.
 
In the case of tax policy, politicians impose high tax rates and punitive forms of double taxation. As anybody with a modicum of common sense could predict, this bad tax policy undermines economic performance and drives economic activity to jurisdictions with better tax law. The politicians then have two ways to respond. They can lower tax rates and reform tax systems, an approach that simultaneously would boost growth and improve compliance. Or they can tighten the thumbscrews on taxpayers, trample their rights, and conspire with other high-tax nations to punish the jurisdictions that do have good policy.
 
Not surprisingly, most politicians choose the latter approach. And the attack on low-tax jurisdictions is a particularly loathsome part of their response. As this video explains, tax competition is a liberalizing force in the world economy and the effort by high-tax nations to penalize so-called tax havens is driven by a statist impulse to prop up decrepit and inefficient welfare states.

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What Can’t America Copy Europe’s Welfare States and Have a Low Corporate Tax Rate?

I tangle with my old nemesis Christian Weller, one of the statists at the Center against American Progress, in a debate on whether the corporate tax rate should be reduced. I was somewhat amused that Christian defended the current system because companies currently are earning profits. Maybe I’ll eventually convince him to be a capitalist.

The debate was fairly uneventful, but I was a bit disappointed that my comment about the Laffer Curve got buried at the end of the segment. The fundamental point is that America has a very high corporate tax rate by world standards, yet we collect relatively little revenue. My argument, not surprisingly, is that revenues are low because the tax rate is high.

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I’m More Important than Paul Krugman and George Soros

Actually, I wish that were true. But I’m slightly amused to see that I’m ranked as the 244th most-influential person in the world of global finance according to the FCI500 Index put together by Financial Centres International. George Soros ranks 262 and Paul Krugman is way down at 407. I don’t actually deal with money, of course. My role in this field is to fight for tax competition, largely by seeking to derail the tax harmonization schemes of international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, European Commission, and United Nations. Here are the top 10 and three other people you will recognize.

1 Mario Draghi - Governor Banca d’Italia
2 Timothy Geithner – Secretary of the Treasury US Department of the Treasury
3 Barney Frank – Congressman United States House of Representatives
4 Dominique Strauss-Kahn – Managing Director International Monetary Fund
5 Josef Ackermann – Chairman of the Management Board and the Group Executive Committee Deutsche Bank AG
6 Nout Wellink - President De Nederlandsche Bank
7 Zhou Xiaochuan- Governor People’s Bank of China
8 Michel Barnier – Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services European Commission
9 Jean-Claude Trichet – President European Central Bank
10 Stefan Walter – Secretary General Basel Committee on Banking Supervision
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244 Daniel J. Mitchell – Senior Fellow The Cato Institute
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262 George Soros – Hedge Fund Manager Quantum Mutual Funds.
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407 Paul Krugman – Columnist and Economist New York Times

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America’s Greediest State and Local Governments

I ran across two interesting lists showing how politicians at the state and local level are often just as bad as the ones in Washington, DC. First, Forbes has an article identifying the 10 states with the highest income tax rates. The top rate is a big deterrent to entrepreneurs and investors, but it’s also important to look at the income level where the top tax rate takes effect. Yes, Hawaii, Oregon, and California have terrible tax policy, but Iowa, Maine, and Washington, DC, deserve special scorn for raping the middle class.

Hawaii:                       11% (income over $400,000 (couple), $200,000 (single))
Oregon:                      11% (income over $500,000 (couple), $250,000 (single))
California:                   10.55% (income over $1 million)
Rhode Island:             9.9% (income over $373,650)
Iowa:                          8.98% (income over $64,261)
New Jersey                 8.97% (income over $500,000)
New York:                   8.97% (income over $500,000)
Vermont:                     8.95% (income over $373,650)
Maine:                        8.5% (income over $39,549 (couple), $19,749 (single))
Washington, D.C.:      8.5% (income over $40,000)

Looking at the other major source of revenue for state and local governments, the Tax Foundation identifies the cities with the highest total sales tax rate - a number that often includes three separate levies by state, county, and city governments. Here are the top 10. Or should I say worst 10?

Birmingham AL              10.000%
Montgomery AL             10.000%
Long Beach CA                9.750%
Los Angeles CA               9.750%
Oakland CA                    9.750%
Fremont CA                     9.750%
Chicago IL                     9.750%
Glendale AZ                    9.600%
Seattle WA                     9.500%
San Francisco CA           9.500%

One thing that stands out is that California is on both lists, which helps explain why the state is such a basket case. Seattle deserves a special mention because at least there is no state income tax in Washington.

Last but not least, it’s worth mentioning that there’s no sales tax or income tax in New Hampshire. Live Free or Die!

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Should American Taxpayers Subsidize Left-Wing Bureaucrats in Paris (Who get Tax-Free Salaries) so They Can Advocate Higher Taxes in America?

The federal government is capable of enormous waste, which obviously is bad news, but the worst forms of government spending are those that actually leverage bad things. The old welfare system, for instance, paid people not to work and have babies out of wedlock (this still happens, but it’s not as bad as it used to be). Paying exorbitant salaries to federal bureaucrats is bad, but it’s even worse if they take their jobs seriously and promulgate new regulations and otherwise harass people in the productive sector of the economy. In a previous video on the economics of government spending, I called this the “negative multiplier” effect.

One of the worst examples of a negative multiplier effect is the $100 million that taxpayers spend each year to subsidize the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This video has the gory details.

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Taxes Are for the Little People, not John Kerry

In the future, all dictionary publishers should get rid of their existing definitions for “hypocrisy” and replace them with a photo of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. He’s just been caught committing the horrible sin of saving his family more than $500,000 by domiciling his new yacht in Rhode Island (which is a tax haven for such luxuries) rather than his home state. Or at least Senator Kerry says that tax planning is a horrible sin with conducted by “Benedict Arnold” companies and facilitated by those wicked tax havens. But I guess that it’s not such a bad thing when Senator Kerry is protecting his wealth. For the rest of us peasants, it’s our job to meekly get in line and submit to whatever taxes Senator Kerry graciously decides to impose.

Sen. John Kerry, who has repeatedly voted to raise taxes while in Congress, dodged a whopping six-figure state tax bill on his new multimillion-dollar yacht by mooring her in Newport, R.I. Isabel – Kerry’s luxe, 76-foot New Zealand-built Friendship sloop with an Edwardian-style, glossy varnished teak interior, two VIP main cabins and a pilothouse fitted with a wet bar and cold wine storage – was designed by Rhode Island boat designer Ted Fontaine. But instead of berthing the vessel in Nantucket, where the senator summers with the missus, Teresa Heinz, Isabel’s hailing port is listed as “Newport” on her stern. Could the reason be that the Ocean State repealed its Boat Sales and Use Tax back in 1993, making the tiny state to the south a haven – like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Nassau – for tax-skirting luxury yacht owners? Cash-strapped Massachusetts still collects a 6.25 percent sales tax and an annual excise tax on yachts. Sources say Isabel sold for something in the neighborhood of $7 million, meaning Kerry saved approximately $437,500 in sales tax and an annual excise tax of about $70,000. …state Department of Revenue spokesguy Bob Bliss confirmed the senator “is under no obligation to pay the commonwealth sales tax.”

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Good News from Romania

Redistributionists hate the flat tax, and this sentiment is widely shared by other statists. These proponents of big government want the tax system to to punish success and generate loot that can be used to buy votes (though they don’t seem to understand that if they punish success too much, they won’t actually get any additional money to spend, but that’s a separate issue). This is why it’s been amusing to watch nations in Eastern Europe adopt flat tax systems and compete with each other to have the lowest tax rate. The people who actually lived under communism are the ones most anxious to jettison the notion that a tax system should be based on “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”
 
But this doesn’t mean the flat tax is a permanent feature of the fiscal landscape in Eastern Europe. The high-tax nations of Western Europe don’t like the flat tax. The bureaucrats at the OECD and European Commission don’t like the flat tax. The IMF and World Bank don’t like the flat tax. And, of course, there are always redistributionists in every nation who resent success and politicians who want more power. So it is remarkable that flat tax systems have been so durable. But I’ve seen several stories in recent weeks that the flat tax in Romania might be repealed and replaced with a class-warfare system. This would be bad news, and could be even worse news if it was the beginning of a trend. The good news, though, is that the Prime Minister just announced that there are no plans to change the system (notwithstanding the misguided views of the nation’s Financed Minister). Tax-news.com reports.

During a recent gathering of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Bucharest, Romania’s Prime Minister Emil Boc announced government plans to maintain the flat tax of 16% imposed on income and profits, while also confirming plans to abolish the minimum tax from the autumn. Emphasizing that maintaining the flat tax was a fundamental objective of the government, Prime Minister Boc confirmed that the existing system would not be replaced by a progressive system of taxation, as it would not serve to generate additional income for the state budget. The government therefore has no reason to abolish the flat tax, Boc reasoned, which is also a symbol of stability and coherence of economic activity. Romanian Finance Minister Sebastian Vladescu had urged the government to move from the flat tax system of income tax, representing a bygone era, to a system of progressive rates, vital to supporting the state.

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Jilted Basketball Fans Should Blame the Income Tax, not LeBron James

Supporters of the Cleveland Cavaliers, especially the owner of the team, are upset that basketball superstar LeBron James has decided to sign with the Miami Heat. The anger is especially intense because the Cavaliers offered $4 million more over the next five years. But their anger is misplaced, because more money in Cleveland, Ohio, actually translates into about $1 million less disposable income when the burden of state and local income taxes is added to the equation. Rather than condemn James for making a rational choice, local basketball fans should tar and feather Ohio politicians. This story from CNBC walks through the calculations.

…if you match up what James’ salary would be for the first five years in Cleveland and the five years in Miami, you find that the Cavaliers are only offering him $4 million more. That advantage gets erased — and actually gives the Heat the monetary edge over — when you consider the income tax difference. …Playing in Cleveland, LeBron would face a state income tax of 5.925 percent, plus a Cleveland city tax of two percent. Over the first five years of a new contract with Cleveland, James would give back $3,953,060 combined to the state and city for the 41 games each season he’d play at home. But James would have to pay none of that for home games in Miami since Florida doesn’t have an income tax. Athletes have to pay income taxes to states that they play in on the road, so the games he’ll play away from home — whether he played for Cleveland or Miami — are essentially a wash. But there are, on average, 11 away games per season where James would have to pay Ohio and Cleveland taxes. Why? Because he has to pay when he plays in the six areas – Florida, Texas, Washington D.C., Illinois, Toronto and Tennessee – that have no jock taxes. That’s another $1,061,128 he’ll have to pay in taxes that he wouldn’t have to pay in Miami.

New York basketball fans also should be angry. With some of the highest taxes in the nation, many of which target highly productive people as part of a class-warfare policy, New York is bad news for professional athletes. The New York Post, commenting on the probability that James would sign with the Miami Heat, identified the real villains.

…blame our dysfunctional lawmakers in Albany, who have saddled top-earning New Yorkers with the highest state and city income taxes in the nation, soon to be 12.85 percent on top of the IRS bite. There is no state income tax in Florida. On a five-year contract worth $96 million — what he’d get from the Knicks or the Heat — LeBron would pay $12.34 million in New York taxes. Quite a penalty for the privilege of working in Midtown.

Now let’s look at the big picture. The calculations that LeBron James made when deciding to sign with the Miami Heat are the same calculations that companies make when deciding whether to build factories and create jobs. So when people wonder why high-tax states such as Ohio, California, and New York are losing jobs to zero-income tax states such as Florida and Texas, part of the answer should be obvious. And if we move to the global level, folks should not be too surprised that companies and investors, all other things equal, are likely to avoid the United States, with its punitive 35 percent corporate tax, and instead create jobs and build wealth in places such as Hong Kong, Ireland, and Switzerland.

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Connecticut Is Terrible, but New York Is Worse

The Wall Street Journal opines about the latest bone-headed move by New York politicians to drive away productive activity. Connecticut is not exactly a low-tax jurisdiction, but sometimes being less worse is all that’s necessary to win a tax competition battle.

Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell, a Republican who usually doesn’t mind higher taxes…has nonetheless declared a tax-competition border war amid the New York Assembly’s bid “to vastly increase the tax liability of hedge fund professionals who work in New York.” That’s how Mrs. Rell put it in a letter last week to the New York Hedge Fund Roundtable, imploring its members to relocate to her state and offering to do “anything possible to assist you,” including the aid of state “relocation specialists.” …Arguably the hallmark of bad decision-making is whatever they cook up in Albany—which is planning to tax the carried interest income of New York-based hedge fund managers who live out of state at the top ordinary tax rate of 8.97%. …the New York Assembly…thinks it can raise $50 million by targeting bridge-and-tunnel commuters to Manhattan too. It never will, given the mobility of capital. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg—who knows the combined city-state top tax rate approaches 13%—told the New York Observer that “I think it’s the best thing that ever happened to Connecticut. I can’t imagine why every hedge fund wouldn’t pick up tomorrow and move.” …Last September—after years of tax-hike plans that fell through—Mrs. Rell and the Democratic legislature raised the top income tax rate to 6.5% from 5% on filers making more than $500,000. The state’s combined state-local tax burden of 11.1% is the third highest in the nation, according to the Tax Foundation, after New York (No. 2) and New Jersey (No. 1). Those sins duly noted, Mrs. Rell is nonetheless right in this case, and you can expect a further migration to the Nutmeg State from the economic nut house that is New York.

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Seeking to Undermine Competition from the Internet, Politicians Pushing Privacy-Destroying State Sales Tax Cartel

One of the good features of the Internet is that it gives people more options. But this is bad news for politicians, who like to control – and tax – what people are doing. But it’s not easy for politicians at the state level to impose high sales taxes on consumers when people have the freedom to buy things sold in other states. Politicians do impose “use taxes,” which supposedly require people to pay taxes on goods purchased in other states, but 99 percent of consumers evade this tax since there’s no feasible way to enforce the levy. In an effort to gain more control (and more money), greedy politicians at the state and local level want Congress to impose a nationwide sales tax cartel. I wrote about why this was a bad idea back in 2001, both because it would undermine tax competition between states and because it would be a gross invasion of privacy. Here’s an excerpt from a report on the latest battle in this fiscal war:

The halcyon days of tax-free Internet shopping will, if Rep. Bill Delahunt gets his way, soon be coming to an abrupt end. Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a bill on Thursday that would rewrite the ground rules for Internet and mail order sales by eliminating the option for many Americans to shop over the Internet without paying state sales taxes. At the moment, Americans who shop over the Internet from out-of-state vendors usually aren’t required to pay sales taxes. Californians buying books from Amazon.com or cameras from Manhattan’s B&H Photo, for example, won’t be required to cough up the sales taxes that they would if shopping at a local mall. …The National Conference of State Legislatures applauded Delahunt’s legislation, saying he should be commended for allowing states to collect as much as $23 billion in new taxes. …the pro-tax forces have offered a proposal that they hope Congress can be persuaded to adopt. The concept is called the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement, invented in 2002 by state tax officials hoping to straighten out some of sales tax laws’ most notorious convolutions. Since then, some 24 states have signed on, either wholly or partially, to the agreement, meaning they agree to simplify their tax codes and make them uniform. If enough states participate, proponents believe it will be easier to convince Congress to make sales collection mandatory for out-of-state retailers. …State tax collectors haven’t exactly been idle while waiting for Congress. They’ve been trying to force Amazon to turn over purchase records in North Carolina, attempting to force retailers to become tax-tattlers in California and Tennessee, and putting the squeeze on affiliate programs in Colorado.

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Thanks to Tax Competition, Corporate Tax Rates Continue to Fall in Europe

Many people assume that Europe is the land of high-tax welfare states and America is an outpost of laissez-faire capitalism. We should be so lucky. The burden of government in America is still lower than it is in the average European nation, but the United States is a lot closer to France than it is to Hong Kong – and the trend is not comforting.
 
We recently endured the embarrassing spectacle of President Obama arguing with Europeans that they should increase the burden of government spending. Now we have a new report from the European Commission indicating that the average corporate tax rate in member nations of the European Union has plummeted to just 23.5 percent while the corporate tax rate in the U.S. has stagnated at 35 percent. In the past dozen years alone, as the chart illustrates, the average corporate tax rate in the European Union has dropped by nearly 12 percentage points. To make matters worse, the corporate tax rate in America actually is closer to 40 percent if state tax burdens are added to the mix.  

 

This is not to say that European politicians are reading Hayek and Friedman (or watching Dan Mitchell videos on corporate taxation). Almost all of the positive reforms are because of tax competition. Thanks to globalization, it is increasingly easy for labor and (especially) capital to cross national borders to escape bad policy. As such, nations now have to compete for jobs and investment, and this liberalizing process is particularly powerful among nations that are neighbors. 

Not surprisingly, European politicians despise tax competition and instead would prefer to impose a one-size-fits-all policy of tax harmonization. These efforts to create a tax cartel have a long history, beginning even before Reagan and Thatcher lowered tax rates and triggered the modern era of tax competition. The European Commission originally wanted to require a minimum corporate tax rate of 45 percent. And as recently as 1992, there were an effort to require a minimum corporate tax rate of 30 percent.  

 

Fortunately, the politicians did not succeed in any of these efforts. As such, tax competition remains alive and corporate tax rates continue to fall. What remains to be seen, however, is whether America will join the race to lower corporate tax rates – and more jobs and investment.

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European Central Bank President Wants to Exacerbate Continent’s Fiscal Crisis

It’s been amusing, in an I-told-you-so fashion, to follow the fiscal crises in Greece, Spain, and other European welfare states.And I feel like a voyeuristic ghoul as I observe the incredibly misguided bailout policies being adopted by the political elites (who are trying to bail out the business elites who made silly loans to corrupt nations in Southern Europe). But I’m not sure how to describe my emotions (dumbfounded fascination?) about the latest bad idea emanating from Europe – to have a fiscal federation that would give bureaucrats in Brussels power over national budgets. It’s quite possible that this would result in some externally-imposed discipline for a basket case such as Greece, so it would not always lead to terrible results. But most of the decisions would be bad, particularly since the Euro-crats would use new powers to curtail tax competition in order to enhance the ability of governments to impose bad tax policy in order to seize more money. Moreover, fiscal centralization would exacerbate the main problem in Europe by creating a new avenue – cross-border subsidies - for people who want to mooch by getting access to other people’s money. The Wall Street Journal Europe has a good editorial on the issue:

Of all the possible responses to Europe’s sovereign debt woes, the notion of centralizing fiscal authority in Brussels may well be the most destructive. But that was exactly what European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet proposed in testimony before the European Parliament Monday. Mr. Trichet’s idea is that an independent body within the European Commission should have broad power to sanction national governments for fiscal or macroeconomic policies that threatened the stability of the euro. This would amount, in Mr. Trichet’s words, to the “equivalent of a fiscal federation” for the euro zone. Mr. Trichet has spent nearly 40 years as a civil servant in one form or another, which may explain his belief that Europe’s budgetary problems can be solved by technocrats. …Fiscal centralization would also undermine competition between different fiscal and macroeconomic policies within the euro zone. That would delight some countries, and probably some at the European Commission as well. During this crisis, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde has criticized Germany for becoming too competitive for the euro zone’s own good. And a decade ago, France was among the euro-zone countries that attacked Ireland for lowering its corporate income-tax rate to 12.5% to attract investment. …Ireland’s 12.5% corporate tax rate was an experiment that contributed to a lowering of rates around the world in the succeeding years.

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America’s Self-Destructive (and Imperialist) Tax Regime

One of my main issues at the Cato Institute (and one of the reasons I was a founder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity) is protecting and promoting fiscal sovereignty. I don’t want international bureaucracies such as the United Nations or Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development telling nations what kind of tax systems they’re allowed to have – especially since those bureaucracies want to undermine tax competition in order to prop up high-tax welfare states. While I realize international tax issues are not that exciting, there is an excellent column in the Wall Street Journal Europe that shows the negative impact when nations (in this case, the United States) seek to tax economic activity in other nations. When foreigners no longer want to invest in America and when Americans are compelled into giving up U.S. citizenship, that’s a sign of a bad tax code:

American expatriates are fast becoming the world’s financial refugees. Onerous legislation from the U.S. government is making it too difficult – and too expensive – for banks to service U.S. citizens that live abroad. …An increasing number are taking the most drastic step and renouncing their citizenship. …bankers, lawyers and accountants are waking up to the wider implications of the new rules. American expats, it seems, may only be the first to suffer. …Foreign banks are, in effect, being asked to act as the international enforcement arms of the Internal Revenue Service. Those banks that don’t comply will be subject to a 30% withholding tax on all payments made to them in the U.S. Many banks and wealth managers have decided it is far easier to politely show their U.S. clients the door. Earlier this month, the law firm Withers conducted a survey of bankers, accountants, independent financial advisers, trust companies and other private client advisors to analyze the impact of the HIRE Act. Over half said they have seen instances where Americans were denied investment and banking services in the last two years. And 95% expect this to increase as a result of the HIRE Act. …The U.S. government already taxes expatriate citizens on their worldwide income regardless of where it is earned or where they live, making them the only people in the developed world who are taxed in both their country of citizenship and country of residence. …there has been an explosion in the time it takes us to keep U.S. expat clients compliant with the U.S. tax regime. He says that their bills have “at least doubled” in the past couple of years. …A number of banks decided that the concept of U.S. citizenship was too nebulous for them to police. Darlene Hart, the chief executive of U.S. Tax & Financial Services says that when the rule came out in 2001 many of her U.S. clients received letters from their wealth managers telling them that their investment portfolios had been liquidated. Now a second wave of banks – especially in Switzerland but increasingly in the UK and the Channel Islands – are closing their doors to Americans because of the added burden of the HIRE Act. …What then are U.S. expats to do if even more banks cut them adrift as a result of those reviews? A small but growing number have decided that the best way to avoid the rules is to hand in their passports. According to U.S. government figures, twice as many Americans renounced their citizenship in the last quarter of 2009 than in the whole of 2008. The numbers are still only in the hundreds but are expected to rise now that the HIRE Act has been signed. Ms. Hart says the last time she checked it was not possible to get an appointment at the U.S. embassy in London to renounce citizenship until 2012. In Bern, you couldn’t get an appointment until June next year. …Those that don’t want to take such a drastic step can move their investments back to the U.S. However, this can be tricky without an address in the U.S. because of the Patriot Act, which tightened up the procedures by which banks verify their clients’ identities. …although it is the U.S. expats that are suffering the most at the moment, the impact of the new law could eventually be felt far more widely. The banks that sign up to the new rules are likely to pay for the required upgrades to their systems by increasing the bank fees for their rest of their customers. And eventually the reverberations from the HIRE Act may also be felt back in the U.S. …Nearly three-quarters of respondents to the Withers survey said they expected to see investment into the U.S. decrease in the coming years because of the HIRE Act. Wegelin & Co. is, for one, advising its clients to exit all direct investments in U.S. securities.

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Anti-Tax Competition Schemes by High-Tax Nations Will Expand the Underground Economy

Regular readers know that I am a big supporter of international tax competition as a mechanism to limit the greed of the political elite. Unfortunately, the statists are having some success in their efforts to undermine the fiscal sovereignty of low-tax jurisdictions. Even the Swiss have been forced to weaken their human rights policy of protecting financial privacy. So does this mean the politicians from high-tax nations will get more money to spend? Probably not. One reason is that “better” enforcement of high tax rates on saving and investment will have the same economic impact as an increase in tax rates. This, of course, will mean less saving and investment, which translates into slower growth and a smaller tax base. Another reason is that restrictions on the ability to shift economic activity across border to escape oppressive taxation will lead many people to find domestic strategies as a substitute means of protecting their income and assets. An article by a Romanian academic explains further and notes that low-tax jurisdictions will continue to enjoy better economic performance.

It is of course illegal not to declare assets and income held abroad, but the fact that some people are driven to this extreme suggests that in some countries taxes have reached unacceptably high levels. In exactly the same fashion, people are also driven to hide some of their economic activity from the tax man, giving rise to the well known phenomenon of the underground economy. In fact, tax evasion is as old as taxes themselves, and the best way to minimize it is to levy reasonable taxes. International tax evasion and the local underground economy provide the two main escape routes. In modern democratic times, they also set implicit limits to the growth of government. They are both illegal, but the local shadow economy is now so widespread that governments know that they cannot enforce compliance without becoming hugely unpopular (suggesting that high taxes are, in fact, not as widely accepted by the population as some would like to think). Limiting international tax competition looks a much easier bet. However, if high-tax countries are successful in stopping the shift of savings to tax havens by enforcing transparency and information exchange, they will displace, but not halt, tax evasion and fiscal competition. The underground economy, both local and international, will grow. In the meantime, wealthy people and their assets will continue to move from high to low tax environments. Over time, the economically more attractive places will still enjoy much higher rates of economic growth.

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America Will Now Be the Unquestioned World Leader…But in the Wrong Way

The United States has a very anti-competitive corporate tax regime. The federal tax rates is 35 percent and the average of state corporate tax systems brings the rate to nearly 40 percent. In Europe, by contrast, the average corporate tax rate is about 25 percent. Depending on which measure is used, the United States and Japan have been rivals for the dubious prize of having the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. But that’s about to change. According to a story that I saw linked on the Tax Foundation blog, the new Japanese government intends to lower its corporate tax rate by 10 to 15 percentage points. This means America will have no rivals in the contest for having the most anti-growth business tax system in the world. This is something to keep in mind the next time you hear a politician complaining about jobs going to China and India.

Japan’s new government plans to cut corporate tax closer to international norms as it tries to haul Asia’s biggest economy out of a long slump, the economy minister said in a report Friday. The government is aiming to cut tax on company earnings by five percentage points next fiscal year, from an effective 40 percent now, the Nikkei business daily quoted Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Masayuki Naoshima as saying. “It’s a fact that international corporate tax rates are 10 to 15 points lower than Japan’s,” said Naoshima, who is part of Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s new cabinet sworn in this week. “Over the medium term, the government will aim to bring the rate down to around the global standard,” he said. …”It is now the time to decide (on cutting corporate tax) for the sake of future economic vitality, employment and securing increased tax revenues,” the minister said. “Japan’s economy has basically been in a slump for the past 20 years and people have been overwhelmed by a sense of stagnation.”

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Primer Makes the Case for Tax Competition to Restrain Government Oppression

The Freeman has an article by an expert from Bermuda about the importance of giving taxpayers an escape option to curtail the greed of the political elite. Here’s an excerpt:

The Declaration of Independence had it exactly right: “He [King George III] has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” Today, the United States makes George III look like a piker. …The U.S. governments—federal, state, and local—find that extracting 35–40 percent of incomes is not sufficient. They need more to continue their march toward the perfect welfare state… The EU countries are even worse, with governments raking in around 50 percent of national output. Even Louis IV of France would now be viewed as a benevolent uncle compared to that. The U.S. and EU governments intrude on the financial lives of citizens in every conceivable way, from taxes to regulations to absurd laws that shape and control their citizens. …Thomas Paine, who wrote of “the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry,” would be astounded at today’s situation. …There are a number of countries, disparagingly called tax havens (or offshore financial centers), most of them small and insignificant, such as Bermuda, Monaco, Liechtenstein, and Cayman, that are allegedly sabotaging the grandiose plans of the United States and the European Union to create their utopian welfare states… The greatest enemy of the modern State is not the terrorist, criminal, hoodlum, or even the foreign aggressor; it is the citizen who simply wants to keep his own income or to protect his own wealth. “Need” is defined as getting your hands on other people’s money, and greed has come to mean the natural desire to protect your own property and assets from sequestration by governments. …Tax competition compels governments to think more carefully before spending the public’s money and frees entrepreneurs for greater access to investment funds. Contrary to common belief, low-tax jurisdictions do not siphon off capital from high-tax areas, but allow a better and more effective means of making investment decisions. The Bible established a tax rate of 10 percent, known as the tithe. That should be enough for governments. There is little hope for optimism on that score. Low-tax countries are an affront to high-tax countries that believe they have a right to tell the rest of the world how to live. So high-tax countries try to force their tax regimes on everyone else. That is financial imperialism.

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Europe’s Greedy Politicians Resent Switzerland’s Pro-Growth Tax Policy

This story from Business Week warmed my heart. Switzerland’s cantons are competing to create better tax policy, and this is attracting companies seeking to escape the kleptocracies elsewhere in Europe. This shows the value of tax competition (imagine how bad taxes would be in Germany and France if politicians in those nations didn’t have to worry about taxpayers escaping over the border) and the benefits of federalism (unlike the United States, Switzerland has not made the mistake of letting the central government becoming the dominant force in fiscal policy).

“Low corporate taxes will help Switzerland attract business, but it’s also creating tension as European governments seek revenue to plug their fiscal deficits.” said Alan McQuaid, chief economist at Bloxham Stockbrokers in Dublin. Switzerland reported a fiscal surplus last year, and cantons from Zurich to Schwyz are lowering taxes. “There is still a clear downward trend in taxation,” said Martin Eichler, head of research at BakBasel, an economic consulting firm in Basel, Switzerland. “There is pressure to be attractive to companies and the cantons are saying that if we have to save somewhere, then it won’t be on tax.” Swiss corporate tax rates, including a federal rate of 8.5 percent, range from 11.8 percent in the town of Pfaeffikon in Schwyz to 24.2 percent in Geneva, according to tax consultant Mattig-Suter & Partner. That compares with a corporate tax rate of 28 percent in the U.K. and 35 percent in the U.S. Vaud, running east along the lake from Geneva to Montreux, persuaded Shire Plc to set up an office last month with the help of tax relief on its corporate rate of 23.5 percent, said Eric Maire, the canton’s senior project director for economic promotion. That follows the March decision of Ineos Group Holdings Plc to relocate from its U.K. base. …Tax increases in the U.K. played a “key role” in persuading firms such as BlueCrest Capital Management and Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP to shift part of their London-based operations to Geneva, said Loeffler. Smaller cantons want to emulate Zug, which used a tax rate of 15.8 percent to more than double its number of registered companies to 29,134 since 1990. The canton is home to miner Xstrata Plc and Transocean Ltd., the world’s largest offshore oil and gas driller.

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Greetings from Curacao

As you can tell from my last couple of posts, I’m getting increasingly upset with politicians who do the wrong thing and make our lives worse off. I’m especially bitter about how so much of what government does is for the benefit of powerful insiders and has a negative impact on the less fortunate in society.

So the time has come for me to take a deep breath and appreciate the fact that I’m on a beautiful Caribbean island. I’m in Curacao for a speech to a Wealth Preservation conference, where I’ll be talking about the importance of fighting international bureaucracies (such as the OECD) that are trying to hinder the flow of jobs and capital from high-tax nations to low-tax jurisdictions. To put it bluntly, I want to make it easier for people to “Go Galt” and protect themselves from rapacious politicians. Given what has happened in Europe, this battle is getting more important every day.

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Say Goodbye to England

Okay, the title of this post is an absurd exaggeration, but I am not optimistic about the future of the United Kingdom. Government spending has exploded over the last ten-plus years (the largest expansion in the burden of government spending among developed nations), and this unsurprisingly has led to punitive class-warfare policies. I saved this article from the Daily Mail from a couple of months ago because I was curious to see whether predictions about talent fleeing London would prove accurate:

London will become the most highly taxed financial centre in the world when the new 50 per cent income tax rate for those earning £150,000 or more comes into force next month. Taxes will be higher than for financial workers living in the other key centres of New York, Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva, Zurich, Dubai and Hong Kong, KPMG calculated. The findings will raise fears that Labour’s levies are driving businesses and bankers overseas and threatening Britain’s competitiveness. …Tullett announced last December that it will help employees move abroad if they want to avoid the top rate of tax, and Mr Smith said workers are already looking at relocating. Graeme Leach of the Institute of Directors said: ‘The 50 per cent rate is a policy that should never have been announced. The indirect impact on entrepreneurial aspiration, business confidence and foreign investment is likely to be significant.

As we can see from this Bloomberg article, it appears that the feckless big-government policies of all the major parties are driving productive investors and entrepreneurs to jurisdictions with better tax law. Switzerland seems to be the biggest beneficiary. As you read the details below, one thing to keep in mind is that at least Brits are free to emigrate. The U.S. government imposes repugnant Soviet-style exit taxes designed to ransack successful people who want the freedom to move someplace with more liberty:

…more than 100 bankers, hedge fund managers and wealthy retirees are gathered on a cold March night to plot their escape from Britain. Swiss government officials and Geneva-based financial advisers have come to London to lure rich residents with glowing descriptions of the country’s low taxes, safe streets, private-banking options and convenient ski weekends. …Next door, an overflow crowd of 50 more attendees enjoys wine and canapes as they watch the presentation on closed- circuit televisions in a mahogany-lined library, which includes a chart showing the prevalence of English as a language for doing business in Switzerland. A JPMorgan Chase & Co. banker who declined to be identified confides he’s planning to relocate next year. His main complaint: higher U.K. taxes, a theme the Swiss delegation has pounced upon. “Some people think it’s morally wrong to be working for the government for more than half the year,” says Jonathan Ivinson, a Geneva-based tax partner at international law firm Hogan & Hartson LLP… London’s highest earners must now pay a 50 percent tax on incomes above 150,000 pounds ($227,200) that came into force on April 6, replacing a 40 percent top rate. …During the campaign, both Brown and Cameron said they backed additional curbs on the U.K. financial industry — including a bank transaction levy — and agreed that Britain’s dire financial state would lock in higher tax rates for the foreseeable future: …As the taxman’s take grows larger, Switzerland is shaping up as the most-welcoming alternative for British exiles. Light- touch regulation and the willingness of cantons, as regional governments are called, to negotiate special tax rates for both individuals and businesses have prompted at least 30 London hedge fund managers to consider moving to Geneva in the past year, says Shelby du Pasquier, a Geneva-based partner at Lenz & Staehelin, a Swiss law firm. Investment management and advisory services aren’t regulated in Switzerland, apart from anti-money laundering rules, and the federal government and several cantons last year reduced taxes on dividend payments for entrepreneurs, including owners of hedge fund firms, he says. …Geneva has already attracted some of London’s top talent. Alan Howard, co-founder of Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP, Europe’s largest hedge fund firm, has rented office space in Geneva for 60 traders relocating from London. …BlueCrest Capital Management Ltd., Europe’s third-largest hedge fund firm, has opened a Geneva office for as many as 70 traders and analysts who have worked in London on its two biggest funds. They’re being joined by BlueCrest co-founder Michael Platt and Leda Braga, manager of the $9 billion BlueTrend fund, according to people familiar with the firm’s transitional plans. …The departures of those principals prove that the threat to London’s prominence as a financial center is real, says Stuart Fraser, head of policy at the City of London Corporation, which runs the financial district. …U.K. top tax rates will exceed those in Germany and France for the first time since 1989, according to a study by accounting firm KPMG. A banker earning 1 million pounds a year in London will now take home less than his counterparts in Frankfurt, Hong Kong, New York, Paris, Singapore and Zurich, KPMG says. “The U.K. has abandoned one of its key principles when it comes to tax, which is predictability,” says Bertrand des Pallieres, founder of SPQR Capital LLP, a London-based hedge fund firm with about $700 million in assets as of April. He left the U.K. last year and opened an office in Geneva after the new tax rate was announced. It’s not only funds looking at leaving. Broker Tullett Prebon said in December it would allow its 700 employees in London to move to “more certain tax regimes.” Several of Tullett Prebon’s major desks are now planning to move key personnel, the company says. …London Mayor Boris Johnson estimates that up to 9,000 bankers, hedge fund managers and private-equity executives could leave the city, according to a letter he sent to the Labour government in January. …Marcel Jouault is working to make sure that agitated Britons wind up in Pfaeffikon, a village on the shore of Lake Zurich. Pfaeffikon’s 11.8 percent corporate tax rate and 19 percent personal income levy are both Switzerland’s lowest, helping the village lure funds that handle about $100 billion in investments, according to hedge fund research firm Opalesque Ltd.

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The Laffer Curve Strikes…Again

Here’s a blurb from a Wall Street Journal Editorial this morning. It seems a high tax rate is leading to less revenue. When will the politicians finally learn?

What do you do about a tax that costs jobs and raises little money? Florida lawmakers have been pondering that question in relation to the 6% registration tax for owning a boat in the Sunshine State. If you buy a $1 million boat and register it in Florida, you currently pay $60,000 in sales taxes. If you buy the same boat and register it in another coastal state like North Carolina, you pay a maximum of $1,500, in South Carolina $500, and in Rhode Island $600. Even more common is to register the boat in a nearby foreign nation like the Cayman Islands, where you pay close to zero tax. So to refloat the boat business, the Florida House voted last Wednesday to cap the boat sales tax at $18,000. This is roughly the amount of legal costs to register a yacht in the Caymans. Opponents call the repeal a tax cut for the leisure class, and the state’s official revenue estimators predict it will cost $1.4 million a year in lost revenue. This ignores some basic math: Collecting $18,000 per yacht beats getting nothing. …An estimated eight in 10 expensive boats in Florida are registered somewhere else, mostly abroad, and a boating industry study estimates this costs the state $120 million in lost revenue. …This tale is reminiscent of the 10% luxury tax on yachts costing more than $100,000 that Congress passed in 1990. That tax, also passed in the name of social justice, nearly ruined the boat-building industry in states like Florida and Maine, because the rich went to the Bahamas and elsewhere to buy their boats until Congress repealed the yacht tax in 1993.

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Greece’s Problem Is High Tax Rates, not Tax Evasion

The New York Times has an article describing widespread tax evasion in Greece, along with an implication that the country’s fiscal crisis is largely the result of unpaid taxes and could be mostly solved if taxpayers were more obedient to the state. This is grossly inaccurate. A quick look at the budget numbers reveals that tax revenues have remained relatively constant in recent years, consuming nearly 40 percent of GDP. The burden of government spending, by contrast, has jumped significantly and now exceeds 50 percent of Greek economic output.

The article also is flawed in assuming that harsher enforcement is the key to compliance. As the video shows, even the economists at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development admit that tax evasion is driven by high tax rates (which is remarkable since the OECD is the international bureaucracy pushing for global tax rules to undermine tax competition and reduce fiscal sovereignty).

Ironically, the New York Times article quotes Friedrich Schneider of Johannes Kepler University in Austria, but only to provide an estimate of Greece’s shadow economy. The reporter should have looked at an article that Schneider wrote for the International Monetary Fund, which found that:

Macroeconomic and microeconomic modeling studies based on data for several countries suggest that the major driving forces behind the size and growth of the shadow economy are an increasing burden of tax and social security payments… The bigger the difference between the total cost of labor in the official economy and the after-tax earnings from work, the greater the incentive for employers and employees to avoid this difference and participate in the shadow economy. …Several studies have found strong evidence that the tax regime influences the shadow economy. …In Austria, the burden of direct taxes (including social security payments) has been the biggest influence on the growth of the shadow economy… Other studies show similar results for the Scandinavian countries, Germany, and the United States. In the United States, analysis shows that as the marginal federal personal income tax rate increases by one percentage point, other things being equal, the shadow economy grows by 1.4 percentage points. …A study of Quebec City in Canada shows that people are highly mobile between the official and the shadow economy, and that as net wages in the official economy go up, they work less in the shadow economy. This study also emphasizes that where people perceive the tax rate as too high, an increase in the (marginal) tax rate will lead to a decrease in tax revenue.

It is worth noting the Schneider’s research also shows why Obama’s tax policy is very misguided. The President wants to boost the top tax rate by nearly five percentage points, and that’s on top of the big increase in the tax rate on saving and investment included in Obamacare. Based on Schneider’s research, we can expect America’s underground economy to expand.

Shifting back to Greece, Schneider does not claim that tax rates are the only factor determining compliance. But his research indicates that more onerous enforcement regimes are unlikely to put much of a dent in tax evasion unless accompanied by better tax policy (i.e., lower tax rates). Moreover, compliance also is undermined by the rampant corruption and incompetence of the Greek government, but that problem won’t be solved unless politicians reduce the size and scope of the public sector. Needless to say, that’s not very likely. So when I read some of the details in this excerpt from the New York Times, much of my sympathy is for taxpayers rather than the greedy politicians that turned Greece into a fiscal mess:

In the wealthy, northern suburbs of this city, where summer temperatures often hit the high 90s, just 324 residents checked the box on their tax returns admitting that they owned pools. So tax investigators studied satellite photos of the area — a sprawling collection of expensive villas tucked behind tall gates — and came back with a decidedly different number: 16,974 pools. That kind of wholesale lying about assets, and other eye-popping cases that are surfacing in the news media here, points to the staggering breadth of tax dodging that has long been a way of life here. …Such evasion has played a significant role in Greece’s debt crisis, and as the country struggles to get its financial house in order, it is going after tax cheats as never before. …To get more attentive care in the country’s national health system, Greeks routinely pay doctors cash on the side, a practice known as “fakelaki,” Greek for little envelope. And bribing government officials to grease the wheels of bureaucracy is so standard that people know the rates. They say, for instance, that 300 euros, about $400, will get you an emission inspection sticker. …Various studies have concluded that Greece’s shadow economy represented 20 to 30 percent of its gross domestic product. Friedrich Schneider, the chairman of the economics department at Johannes Kepler University of Linz, studies Europe’s shadow economies; he said that Greece’s was at 25 percent last year and estimated that it would rise to 25.2 percent in 2010.

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The IMF Is Urging Governments to Impose Regulatory and Tax Cartels to Benefit Politicians

Price fixing is illegal in the private sector, but unfortunately there are no rules against schemes by politicians to create oligopolies in order to prop up bad government policy. The latest example comes from the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund, who are conspiring with national governments to impose higher taxes and regulations on the banking sector. The pampered bureaucrats at the IMF (who get tax-free salaries while advocating higher taxes on the rest of us) say these policies are needed because of bailouts, yet such an approach would institutionalize moral hazard by exacerbating the government-created problem of “too big to fail.” But what is particularly disturbing about the latest IMF scheme is that the international bureaucracy wants to coerce all nations into imposing high taxes and excessive regulation. The bureaucrats realize that if some nations are allowed to have free markets, jobs and investment would flow to those countries and expose the foolishness of the bad policy being advocated elsewhere by the IMF. Here’s a brief excerpt from a report in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Strauss-Kahn said there was broad agreement on the need for consensus and coordination in the reform of the global financial sector. “Even if they don’t follow exactly the same rule, they have to follow rules which will not be in conflict,” he said. He said there were still major differences of opinion on how to proceed, saying that countries whose banking systems didn’t need taxpayer bailouts weren’t willing to impose extra taxation on their banks now, to create a cushion against further financial shocks. …Mr. Strauss-Kahn said the overriding goal was to prevent “regulatory arbitrage”—the migration of banks to places where the burden of tax and regulation is lightest. He said countries with tighter regulation of banks might be able to justify not imposing new taxes.

I’ve been annoyingly repetitious on the importance of making governments compete with each other, largely because the evidence showing that jurisdictional rivalry is a very effective force for good policy around the world. I’ve done videos showing the benefits of tax competition, videos making the economic and moral case for tax havens, and videos exposing the myths and demagoguery of those who want to undermine tax competition. I’ve traveled around the world to fight the international bureaucracies, and even been threatened with arrest for helping low-tax nations resist being bullied by high-tax nations. Simply stated, we need jurisdictional competition so that politicians know that taxpayers can escape fiscal oppression. In the absence of external competition, politicians are like fiscal alcoholics who are unable to resist the temptation to over-tax and over-spend.

This is why the IMF’s new scheme should be resisted. It is not the job of international bureaucracies to interfere with the sovereign right of nations to determine their own tax and regulatory policies. If France and Germany want to adopt statist policies, they should have that right. Heck, Obama wants America to make similar mistakes. But Hong Kong, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and other market-oriented jurisdictions should not be coerced into adopting the same misguided policies.

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