Over the years, I’ve shared some ridiculous arguments from our leftist friends.
Paul Krugman, for instance, actually wrote that “scare stories” about government-run healthcare in the United Kingdom “are false.” Which means I get to recycle that absurd quote every time I share a new horror story about the failings of the British system.
Today we have some assertions from a statist that are even more absurd
Pascal Saint-Amans is a bureaucrat at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He has spent his entire life sucking at the public teat. After spending many years with the French tax authority, he shifted to the OECD in 2007 and now is in charge of the bureaucracy’s Centre for Tax Policy Administration.
I don’t know why he made the shift, but perhaps he likes the fact that OECD bureaucrats get tax-free salaries, which nicely insulates him from having to deal with the negative consequences of the policies he advocates for folks in the private sector.
Anyhow, Saint-Amans, acting on behalf of the uncompetitive nations that control the OECD, is trying to create one-size-fits-all rules for international taxation and he just wrote a column for the left-wing Huffington Post website. Let’s look at a few excerpts, starting with his stated goal.
To regain the confidence and trust of our citizens, there is a pressing need for action. To this end, the OECD’s work…will pave the way for rehabilitating the global tax system.
You probably won’t be too surprised to learn that the OECD’s definition of “rehabilitating” in order to regain “confidence and trust” does not include tax cuts or fundamental reform. Instead, Monsieur Saint-Amans is referring to the bureaucracy’s work on “tax base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) and automatic exchange of information.”
I’ve already explained that “exchange of information” is wrong, both because it forces low-tax jurisdictions to weaken their privacy laws so that high-tax governments can more easily double tax income that is saved and invested, and also because such a system necessitates the collection of personal financial data that could wind up in the hands of hackers, identity thieves, and – perhaps most worrisome – under the control of governments that are corrupt and/or venal.
So let’s focus on the OECD’s “BEPS” plan, which is designed to deal with the supposed crisis of “massive revenue losses” caused by corporate tax planning.
I explained back in March why the BEPS proposal was deeply flawed and warned that it will lead to “formula apportionment” for multinational firms. That’s a bit of jargon, but all you need to understand is that the OECD wants to rig the rules of international taxation so that high-tax nations such as France can tax income earned by companies in countries with better business tax systems, such as Ireland.
In his column, Monsieur Saint-Amans tries to soothe the business community. He assures readers that he doesn’t want companies to pay more tax as a punishment. Instead, he wants us to believe his BEPS scheme is designed for the benefit of the business community.
Naturally, the business community feels like it’s in the cross-hairs. …But the point of crafting new international tax rules is not to punish the business community. It is to even the playing field and ensure predictability and fairness.
And maybe he’s right…at least in the sense that high tax rates will be “even” and “predictable” at very high rates all around the world if government succeed in destroying tax competition.
You’re probably thinking that Saint-Amans has a lot of chutzpah for making such a claim, but that’s just one example of his surreal rhetoric.
He also wants readers to believe that higher business tax burdens will “foster economic growth.”
The OECD’s role is to help countries foster economic growth by creating such a predictable environment in which businesses can operate.
I guess we’re supposed to believe that nations such as France grow the fastest and low-tax economies such as Hong Kong and Singapore are stagnant.
Yeah, right. No wonder he doesn’t even try to offer any evidence to support his absurd claims.
But I’ve saved the most absurd claim for last. He actually writes that a failure to confiscate more money from the business community could lead to less government spending – and he wants us to believe that this could further undermine prosperity!
Additionally, in some countries the resulting lack of tax revenue leads to reduced public investment that could promote growth.
Wow. I almost don’t know how to respond to this passage. Does he think government should be even bigger in France, where it already consumes 57 percent of the country’s economic output?
Presumably he’s making an argument that the burden of government spending should be higher in all nations.
If so, he’s ignoring research on the negative impact of excessive government spending from international bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and European Central Bank. And since most of those organizations lean to the left, these results should be particularly persuasive.
He’s also apparently unaware of the work of scholars from all over the world, including the United States, Finland, Australia, Sweden, Italy, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.
Perhaps he should peruse the compelling data in this video, which includes a comparison of the United States and Europe.
Not that I think it would matter. Saint-Amans is simply flunky for high-tax governments, and I imagine he’s willing to say and write ridiculous things to keep his sinecure.
Let’s close by reviewing some analysis of the OECD’s BEPS scheme. The Wall Street Journal is correctly skeptical of the OECD’s anti-tax competition campaign. Here’s what the WSJ wrote this past July.
…the world’s richest countries have hit upon a new idea that looks a lot like the old: International coordination to raise taxes on business. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on Friday presented its action plan to combat what it calls “base erosion and profit shifting,” or BEPS. This is bureaucratese for not paying as much tax as government wishes you did. The plan bemoans the danger of “double non-taxation,” whatever that is, and even raises the specter of “global tax chaos” if this bogeyman called BEPS isn’t tamed. Don’t be fooled, because this is an attempt to limit corporate global tax competition and take more cash out of the private economy.
P.S. High-tax nations have succeeded in eroding tax competition in the past five years. The politicians generally claimed that they simply wanted to better enforce existing law. Some of them even said they would like to lower tax rates if they collected more revenue. So what did they do once taxpayers had fewer escape options? As you can probably guess, they raised personal income tax rates and increased value-added tax burdens.
P.P.S. If you want more evidence of the OECD’s ideological mission.
It has allied itself with the nutjobs from the so-called Occupy movement to push for bigger government and higher taxes.
The OECD is pushing a “Multilateral Convention” that is designed to become something akin to a World Tax Organization, with the power to persecute nations with free-market tax policy.
It supports Obama’s class-warfare agenda, publishing documents endorsing “higher marginal tax rates” so that the so-called rich “contribute their fair share.”
The OECD advocates the value-added tax based on the absurd notion that increasing the burden of government is good for growth and employment.
It even concocts dishonest poverty numbers to advocate more redistribution in the United States.
P.P.P.S. I should take this opportunity to admit that Monsieur Saint-Amans probably could get a job in the private sector. His predecessor, for instance, got a lucrative job with a big accounting firm, presumably because “he had ‘value’ to the private sector only because of his insider connections with tax authorities in member nations.” See, it’s very lucrative to be a member of the parasite class.
[…] the moment it was announced, I warned that the OECD’s project on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) was […]
[…] the moment it was announced, I warned that the OECD’s project on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) was […]
[…] the moment it was announced, I warned that the OECD’s project on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) […]
[…] written (several times) about the big-picture implications of this plan, but let’s focus today on […]
[…] of business already is punitive and Warren wants to make it even worse (who does she think she is, an OECD bureaucrat?), yet she has the gall to pontificate about promoting jobs and investment in the United […]
[…] new rules is actually the easy part. The hard part is when the bureaucrats try to rationalize how higher tax rates and bigger government are somehow good for the global […]
Well, he’s right – lower taxes would negatively affect prosperity: the prosperity of he and his cronies.
the OECD is more of a threat to American national security than a few thousand lunatic jihadists with Kalashnikovs in the lawless backlands of the planet…
It is hard for the intoxicating, easier growth leftist coercive ideas to die in the voter-lemming mind. Most voter-lemmings, in the face of decline, will dig in their heels and ride their delusions down to the bottom.
While humanity overall will continue to march towards the fantastical times of greater and greater prosperity, most western world voter-lemmings will drive their countries to the bottom, through a vicious cycle of ever flatter effort-reward curves and ever greater economic growth deficits compared to the world average. With desperate electoral demand to maintain the dream, politicians promising high growth through flatter effort-reward curves and central planning will be found and placed into high offices. Through naïveté, voter-lemmings will latch on to the coercive collectivism current of the times to their self destruction. Let’s hope it does not end like previous dreams of mandatory collectivism (ie. end in world war).
So, just watch how, any time now, American voter-lemmings will pull out of ObamaCare and move towards freer markets in healthcare, and an environment where what you have offered humanity does actually affect the quality of your healthcare. It will happen for sure, just the same way that Argentinian, French, Italian, Greek, and other European voter-lemmings are about to regurgitate a generation of hope to growth through flatter effort-reward curves, and initiate a period of economic growth that matches the world average and staves off decline. Any time now, it’s gonna happen. We’re about to turn the corner….
We will turn the corner when western world decline reaches the point where some countries (very few in the beginning) start pulling out of the OECD, G20 and similar cartels, judging that the benefits of breaking free outweigh the statist cartel retaliation. When we start seeing the first few breakaways, you will hear Zorba exclaim that we have finally turned the corner. Evolution will have spawned its new successful branch. For the time being, the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction and the international statist cabals are managing to coerce an increasing number of freer economies into capitulation. But evolution and a war against the reality of human nature, cannot be held back forever.
The world, and especially western world voter-lemmings will have to live through a great global reorganization in the next couple of decades. A reorganization of their own making.
Tell the big taxers that the USA will have a vote on the Fairtax in the House and Means Committee about one month. Whether it passes or not, just the possibility of the Fairtax will give them a stroke!
Chip Spradley, Georgia 7th District Director
Dan,
The OECD has currently embarked on pulling all the Western countries toward Green Growth (global dirigisme with it as planner linked to the ed reforms OECD drives globally through PISA as I explain in my book) and its next stage-the Great Transition Initiative. The latter was announced at an annual Paris conference last year and is a reinterpretation of Marx’s ‘needs economy’ as the final stage of future economic development globally. Nobody is informing or asking for our consent, just our taxes.
The OECD’s Subjective Well-Being Initiative that came out in April 2013 and was formally adopted by the US and UK through an early December National Research Council report is part of the Great Transition. Toxic vision if you are not part of the tax-free salaried planning oligarchy. As your picture shows, these bureaucrats have inflated views of how their own needs should be met by taxpayers.