Debunking the Global Corporate Tax Cartel, Part I

Early in the Biden years, I wrote a three-part series (here, here, and here) to explain why a global minimum tax on companies is a bad idea.

As I told the BBC back in 2021, this proposed tax cartel is a scheme to increase the tax burden and will be very bad news for workers, consumers, and shareholders.

Folks on the left, however, like the idea of politicians having more power and money. So they defend the cartel, which was organized by the bureaucrats at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In a column for the Washington Post, Natasha Sarin and Kimberly Clausing try to defend the OECD’s tax harmonization scheme.

Republican lawmakers…are attacking…the global minimum tax. …We both worked at Treasury when the agreement was forged, and we believe strongly that it represents an important step forward. …the deal brings together more than 135 jurisdictions, representing about 95 percent of the world economy, to stem the damaging race-to-the-bottom competition that allows the world’s largest multinational companies to shift income offshore rather than pay their fair share at home. The key mechanism is a 15 percent minimum tax — hence the name — and the agreement should be applauded, not pilloried.

The column lists five claims supposedly made by congressional Republicans and the authors then give their response.

For purposes of today’s column, I’ll show their response and then give my response. Sort of a debunking of the debunking, except my main argument is that they are being evasive rather than dishonest.

1st Republican claim: “The agreement threatens U.S. tax sovereignty.”

Here’s how Sarin and Clausing respond.

In the past, some lawmakers have cautioned that we can’t afford to tax mobile corporate income because that income can simply be shifted to countries that offer lower rates. But with a universal 15 percent minimum rate, Congress’s options widen, giving policymakers the freedom to choose rates that align with the nation’s fiscal priorities.

The truth: The authors make it seem like this is a semantic issue –  i.e., is a tax cartel a surrender of sovereignty or an expression of sovereignty. But that’s not important. What matters is whether it is good policy for governments to conspire against taxpayers. The answer unambiguously is no.

2nd Republican claim: “The agreement is an unconstitutional giveaway to foreign governments.”

Here is their response.

Here’s what the deal actually does: Say France implements the minimum tax, but a U.S. multinational with a French subsidiary retains the abileity to move income from France to a low- or no-tax jurisdiction to avoid it. France could then impose a tax topping up the effective rate to 15 percent.

The truth: I have no idea about the legality or constitutionality of the tax cartel, but the authors once again dodge the real issue, which is whether it is a good idea to to divert more money from the productive sector of the economy so that politicians (regardless of their location) can spend more.

3rd Republican claim: “The agreement harms the competitiveness of U.S. businesses.”

Their response:

By raising the “bottom” from zero to 15 percent, and in a way that affects companies regardless of the location of their headquarters, the agreement is a giant step toward a more level playing field, so U.S. businesses don’t end up at a competitive disadvantage.

The truth: Politicians (and the authors!) openly brag about how a global tax cartel will enable governments to grab ever-larger shares of business income. Of course this will harm American companies.

4th Republican claim: “The agreement hurts workers by harming the companies they work for.”

Their response:

A global minimum tax will help the U.S. government create a more balanced system that taxes the most profitable companies in the world at rates that are closer to what middle-class families pay. This means workers will shoulder less of the tax burden themselves.

The truth: As every public finance economist knows, only people pay taxes. Any tax on a business is really a tax on workers, consumers and shareholders. To make matters worse, the higher business tax burdens will reduce investment, which will lower productivity, and thus translate into lower wages for workers.

5th Republican claim: “The agreement harms U.S. government revenue.”

Their response:

Republican lawmakers have argued that the federal government will lose revenue once foreign governments are emboldened to tax U.S. companies. But…the global agreement makes the corporate tax base less porous by reducing profit-shifting to low-tax havens. …The whole point of the agreement was to ensure that countries that want to use the corporate tax to generate revenue can do so. Indeed, the Biden administration has proposed hundreds of billions in new corporate tax revenue

The truth: Since I want to reduce revenue for Washington, I have mixed feelings about this final point. I’ll simply note that the OECD’s own data shows that the global shift to lower tax rates has not led to lower revenues. Heck, the OECD has also produced research confirming there’s a strong Laffer Curve for corporate taxes.

The bottom line is that Sarin and Clausing believe in higher taxes and bigger government.

So it is understandable that they support global tax cartels. Unfortunately, they never explain in their column why a bigger burden of government is desirable.

I suspect their evasiveness is because the evidence (even from left-leaning international bureaucracies) is not on their side.

So let’s hope this global tax cartel falls apart and we can have a new era of tax competition.

P.S. Joe Biden deserves criticism for supporting the OECD’s proposed tax cartel, but let’s not forget that Donald Trump also was very bad on the issue.

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Professor Greg Mankiw: If You Value Inidividual Liberty, then Protect, Promote, and Preserve Competition Between Governments

Other than my experiment dealing with corporate taxation, the first video I narrated for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity dealt with the issue of tax competition.

It was a deliberate choice because I view competition among governments as one of the few effective restraints on the greed of the political class.

Simply stated, in the absence of competitive pressure, politicians will over-tax and over-spend until the welfare state collapses of its own weight. Some of them self-destruct anyhow because sometimes politicians can’t resist myopic policy decisions even when they know the house of cards will come tumbling down. Greece is a good example, though this cartoon shows the same phenomenon in a more amusing fashion.

But if we want to save other nations from that fate, we need competition among governments so politicians have to worry that the geese with the golden eggs can fly away to nations with better policy.

This is why protecting, promoting, and preserving tax competition is my top issue. Heck, I’ve even run the risk of being thrown in a Mexican jail because of my efforts to defend the right of jurisdictions to compete with decrepit welfare states by implementing pro-growth fiscal policy.

With this as background, you won’t be surprised to learn that I’m a big fan of what Greg Mankiw wrote this weekend in the New York Times.

Here’s some of his column, beginning with the (hopefully) obvious point that competition is what drives an economy and provides benefits to consumers.

Most everyone agrees that competition is vital to a well-functioning market economy. Since the days of Adam Smith, economists have understood that the invisible hand of the marketplace works only if producers of goods and services vie with one another. Competition keeps prices low and provides an incentive to improve and innovate.

He then explains that the same principle of competition can protect the interests of taxpayers just as it protects the interests of consumers.

For much the same reason, competition among governments leads to better governance. In choosing where to live, people can compare public services and taxes. They are attracted to towns that use tax dollars wisely. Competition keeps town managers alert. It prevents governments from exerting substantial monopoly power over residents. If people feel that their taxes exceed the value of their public services, they can go elsewhere. They can, as economists put it, vote with their feet. The argument applies not only to people but also to capital. Because capital is more mobile than labor, competition among governments significantly constrains how capital is taxed. Corporations benefit from various government services, including infrastructure, the protection of property rights and the enforcement of contracts. But if taxes vastly exceed these benefits, businesses can — and often do — move to places offering a better mix of taxes and services.

He also points out that federalism is a way of reducing the monopoly power of central governments.

Conservatives applaud such competition among governments. They are skeptical of government power, and they see competition as a check on its potential abuse. Because people and capital will flee from places where their tax dollars do not deliver commensurate value, government officials have little latitude to pursue personal agendas that are substantially adverse to any group of citizens. This logic leads naturally to the principle of federalism. Because exiting a state or locality is easier than leaving the nation, some policy options should be available to state and local governments but not to the federal government. The founding fathers were no fools.

Not surprisingly, the class-warfare crowd despises competition among governments. That’s why they want fiscal policy determined by Washington – and also why they support the pernicious efforts of international bureaucracies to cripple tax competition among nations.

While conservatives embrace governmental competition, liberals have good reason to worry about it. The left has a more expansive view of the role of public policy. Liberals want the government not only to provide public services but also to redistribute economic resources. In the words of President Obama, they want to “spread the wealth around.” Yet redistribution is harder when people and capital are free to move to other jurisdictions that offer better deals.

Mankiw’s column is worth sharing, so please send this post to friends and colleagues. I’d also recommend these powerful short statements by Dan Hannan and Godfrey Bloom, both British members of the European Parliament. And here’s another video on the topic from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, but you get to listen to someone more appealing than me.

But if you like listening to me, for inexplicable reasons, here’s my three-part video series on the value of tax havens as part of the tax competition process.

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When Germany and France Both Agree on Something, You Can Safely Assume It Is a Terrible Idea

I’ve joked on many occasions that bipartisanship occurs in Washington when the evil party and the stupid party come up with an idea that is simultaneously malicious and misguided.

The international version of two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right occurs whenever the French and the Germans conspire on economic policy. The latest example is a joint proposal for “economic governance” for eurozone nations. Here are some blurbs from the BBC’s report.

The French and German leaders have called for “true economic governance” for the eurozone in response to the euro debt crisis. Speaking at a joint news conference, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged much closer economic and fiscal policy in the eurozone. …They also advocated a tax on financial transactions to raise more revenues.

I don’t pretend to have any predictive ability, but I’ll bet dollars-to-donuts that “true economic governance” will lead to more spending and higher taxes. Why? Because “economic governance” is just a sanitized way of describing a cartel of governments.

When politicians don’t have to worry as much about jobs and capital migrating to jurisdictions with less oppressive tax law, they will behave in a predictable fashion by raising tax rates. In other words, the weakening of tax competition is a recipe for bigger, more expensive government.

Indeed, the tax on financial transactions is a perfect example. Any one nation would be unlikely to impose this perverse levy for fear of losing business to neighbors. But if there’s a one-size-fits-all eurozone government, then bad policy becomes more feasible.

The only good news is that Merkel hasn’t totally lost her mind. Perhaps because her de facto socialist party is not doing well in the polls against the de jure socialist party in Germany, she is temporarily resisting the idea of “eurobonds.”

Ms Merkel again played down the chances of introducing “eurobonds” – jointly guaranteed debts of the 17 eurozone governments – as a solution to the crisis. The idea has been advocated by the Italian finance minister, Giulio Tremonti, as well as billionaire investor George Soros as a way of providing cheap financing to struggling governments while also incentivising them to put their finances in order.

The more profligate European governments like eurobonds for the same reason that California and Illinois would like to jointly issue debt with Texas. It’s a way for the spendthrift to free ride off the frugal.

And speculators like eurobonds because their holdings can dramatically rise in value when downside risk gets transferred to taxpayers (nothing wrong with speculation, by the way, so long as losses aren’t socialized).

Eurobonds might temporarily calm European markets, but only by setting the stage for a bigger collapse in the near future when the Germans are pulled underwater by their reckless neighbors.

For those who want more information, this video is a primer on the importance of jurisdictional competition.

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Jeffrey Sachs and the Fictional “Race to the Bottom” Caused by Tax Competition

Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University is a big booster of the discredited notion that foreign aid is a cure-all for poverty in the developing world, but he is now branching out and saying silly things about policy in other areas.

In a column for the Financial Times, he complains that tax competition is forcing governments to “race to the bottom” with regards to tax rates. The answer, he wants us to believe, is some sort of global tax cartel. Sort of an “OPEC for politicians” that will facilitate the imposition of higher tax rates.

Only international co-operation can now solve what is becoming a runaway social crisis in many high-income countries. …With capital globally mobile, moreover, governments are now in a race to the bottom with regard to corporate taxation and loopholes for personal taxation of high incomes. Each government aims to attract mobile capital by cutting taxes relative to others. …countries cannot act by themselves. Even the social democracies of northern Europe, with their balanced budgets and high tax rates, are increasingly being pulled into the vortex of tax cutting and the race to the bottom. …recent trends…require increased, not decreased, taxation of higher incomes, including corporate profits; and that tax and regulatory co-ordination across countries are vital to prevent a ruinous fiscal race to the bottom.

If this overwrought rhetoric is true, it would mean that governments have been starved of revenue because of race-to-the-bottom tax cuts for evil corporations and sinister rich people. Well, it is true that tax competition over the past 30-plus years has resulted in lower tax rates. But do lower tax rates mean less tax revenue, as implied by Sachs’ analysis?

At the risk of being impolite and shattering anyone’s illusions, let’s actually see what happened to the overall tax burden on both personal and corporate income.

This chart, showing the average for industrialized nations, shows that Sachs and his ilk are wrong. Way wrong. Tax rates have come down, but the overall tax burden actually has increased. So while there may be a race to less-destructive tax rates, there certainly isn’t a race to bottom for tax revenue.

Hmmm….lower tax rates and higher tax revenue. That seems vaguely familiar. Maybe it has something to do with “supply-side economics.” One can only wonder if Sachs has heard about that strange idea known as the Laffer Curve.

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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. In a previous video on the economics of government spending, I call this the “negative multiplier” effect, and one of the worst examples is the $100 million that taxpayers spend each year to subsidize the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

There are many other examples of the negative multiplier effect.

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.

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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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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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Tax Haven Policies Attract $Trillions of Job-Creating Investment to the U.S. Economy

I think it is very nice when left-wing groups help make the case for pro-market policies A recent example is a report from the Center for International Policy, which wants to demonize so-called tax havens, but their report shows that the United States is actually the biggest beneficiary of tax haven policies, with more than $2 trillion of non-resident deposits in American financial institutions (the Cayman Islands is in second place, with $1.55 trillion of deposits compared to $2.18 trillion in the U.S.). This augments a report from another left-wing group, which found that Delaware is the world’s best tax haven. In other words, America’s tax haven policies (sadly, only available to non-resident aliens) are enormously beneficial to U.S. financial markets, which means capital that boosts investment and job creation. It’s also worth noting that even non-U.S. tax havens benefit the American economy. As this Treasury Department chart illustrates, Caribbean banking centers have about $2 trillion invested in the U.S. economy. The left-wing groups would like to destroy tax competition and set up a global tax cartel, sort of an “OPEC for politicians,” but the numbers they report underscore how important it is for American policymakers to preserve the open flow of capital and why tax havens are great news for the U.S. economy. Which is exactly what we argued in our video on the Economic Case for Tax Havens.

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