The 2023 Tax Hell Index

Folks on the left think it is terrible for nations to be “tax havens.”

Since I’ve written many columns defending low-tax jurisdictions (including the moral argument), let’s flip the script today and instead look at “tax hells.”

The 1841 Foundation has just released the 2023 version of its Tax Hell Index, which reviews nations (mostly in Europe and the Americas) and ranks them based on fiscal pressure and quality of governance.

Here are the unfortunate countries that are tax hells – or are at risk of crossing the threshold and becoming tax hells.

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The world’s three worst tax hells are Belarus, Venezuela, and Argentina (they also held the top three spots in last years Index).

It’s hardly a surprise to see those nations on the list, or to see countries like Brazil and Russia as well.

The 1841 Foundation explains what makes a nation eligible to be a tax hell.

Although the fiscal pressure is an important factor, we believe that a ‘tax hell’ is not only a country with high taxes, but rather one with a weak rule of law and where the rights to privacy and property are not enforced or protected as required. …Therefore, when considering the results, countries with high government quality and economic and legal stability may have high taxes (i.e., Denmark), but are very far from being considered tax hells. …In fact, there are countries with both low and high taxes in the top-13 tax hells; all of them, however, have low quality of government, high levels of corruption and use of discretionary power, poor economic management, weak institutions, and low or complete lack of legal certainty.

Even though the Index is not based solely on tax, the three best nations (i.e., with the lowest scores) are Ireland, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, all of which have been labelled as tax havens.

Which reaffirms a point I have made about so-called tax havens having higher-quality governance that high-tax nations.

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The World’s Worst “Tax Hells”

Most people don’t know how to define a “tax haven,” but we assume places with no income tax are on the list. And there’s a lot to admire when looking at jurisdictions such as Bermuda, Monaco, and the Cayman Islands.

But what if we want to identify the opposite of a tax haven. What is a “tax hell” and how can they be identified?

A new study for the 1841 Foundation undertakes that task and it lists 12 nations that deserve this unflattering label. Belarus is the worst of the worst, followed by Venezuela, Argentina, and Russia.

But this isn’t just a list of places with high tax burdens.

To be a tax hell, a nation has to have punitive taxation and a lousy government. Here’s how the report describes the methodology.

The Tax Hells Index is an in-depth look at both the qualitative and quantitative data that is released annually by both the IMF and The World Bank. By drawing out critical insights from this data, The 1841 Foundation was able to create a comprehensive index and critically examine 94 countries against a stringent framework. …we believe that a “Tax Hell” is not only a country with high taxes, but rather a country with a weak rule of law and where the rights to privacy and property are not enforced or protected as required. …Therefore, when considering the results, countries with high government quality and economic and legal stability may have high taxes (i.e., Denmark), but are very far from being considered Tax Hells. In fact, there are countries with both low and high taxes in the Top-12 tax hells; all of them, however, have low quality of government, high levels of corruption and discretion, poor economic management, and weak institutions.

By the way, the report identified 12 tax hells, but also lists 14 other nations that are “risky.”

These are countries that should be perceived as high risk.

I’ll close by noting that the report only considers nations in North America, Europe, and South America. If subsequent editions include Asia and Africa, I’m sure there will be more tax hells and more risky jurisdictions.

P.S. The five best-scoring nations are Ireland, Denmark, San Marino, Switzerland, and Luxembourg. Remember, these are not necessarily low-tax jurisdictions. Indeed, Denmark is a high-tax nation. But all of these jurisdictions at least provide high-quality governance.

P.P.S. If you want a defense of tax havens, click here, here, and here.

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The Need for Global Tax Competition

In my recent column listing the “Best and Worst News of 2021,” I included Joe Biden’s global tax cartel as one of the awful things that happened in the past 12 months.

It’s bad news for workers, consumers, and shareholders that politicians approved a system that will require all nations to have a corporate tax rate of at least 15 percent.

From the perspective of politicians, it’s easy to understand why they want a tax cartel. it’s a way for them to get their hands on more money. Just as gas stations would want a system that rigs gas prices at a high level. Or grocery stores would want a system to rig high food prices.

From the perspective of taxpayers, however, tax competition is much better. Politicians have a much harder time raising tax rates (and in many cases feel pressure to lower tax rates) when they know that jobs and investment can shift across borders from high-tax nations to low-tax nations.

As illustrated by this visual.

To explore this issue in greater detail, let’s look at a new article, written by Sven Larson for the European Conservative.

First, a quick history of the global campaign against low taxes. …it has been spearheaded by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD. This government-funded international think tank has built an international cartel of more than 130 governments to battle tax competition. …People who want to keep more of their own money, and who want to enjoy strong privacy laws, are being told by the OECD and the tax cartel that their financial planning is “harmful.” The purpose behind the OECD-led campaign is both sinister and transparent: to make sure taxpayers in high-tax countries have no low-tax options. …It won a big victory this past summer when the countries in the G-7 group complied with the directives of the OECD and agreed to create a global minimum corporate-income tax.

This is spot on.

The OECD is a pro-statism international bureaucracy that looks after the interests of politicians rather than citizens.

Sven also makes a great point about how the corporate tax cartel is just the beginning.

This tax cartel is only the beginning. Once countries with costly governments have created a Berlin Wall around their high-tax jurisdictions, they will be free to collude on other taxes beyond the corporate income tax. Personal income taxes, wealth taxes, death taxes… there is no end to the imagination of a government that does not have to worry about tax competition.

Also spot on.

You should read the entire article. But for purposes of my column, I’m going to highlight one additional point – which is Sven’s observation about how human rights are better protected in a world where people can safely invest their money where national governments can’t grab it.

There are also reasons related to individual freedom to preserve low-tax jurisdictions. To take just one example, in 2017, …Turkish President Erdogan accused investors of “treason” if they moved their assets out of the country. Erdogan’s comments, France24 explains, came on the heels of Turkish prosecutors seizing the assets of an investor who had testified in a court in New York on how a Turkish bank circumvented U.S. sanctions against Iran. The asset seizure easily comes across as retaliatory and meant to send a signal to others who might act in ways that would displease Mr. Erdogan. A total of 23 individuals were affected by the asset seizure. If these individuals had been able to shield their assets from the Turkish government, they would have been free to oppose the Erdogan regime while working, investing, and developing their businesses.

Another argument that is spot on.

The bottom line is that low-tax jurisdictions should be celebrated rather than persecuted.

If the goal is better lives for ordinary people, policy makers should be criticizing tax hells rather than tax havens.

Especially when you consider that politicians have a very strong tendency to over-tax and over-spend (leading to goldfish government) in the absence of some sort of external constraint.

Or, to be more blunt, we need to restrain the “stationary bandit” that leads to “predatory government.”

P.S. Click here or here to learn about the economics of tax competition (and click here to see how many winners of the Nobel Prize agree).

P.P.S. Click here, here, and here for interesting examples of what happens when you oppose the left’s anti-tax competition agenda.

P.P.P.S. Leftists who don’t like tax competition occasionally can be clever.

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The “Pandora Papers”

Remember the supposedly breathtaking revelations from the “Panama Papers” back in 2016?

We were told those stolen documents were an indictment against so-called tax havens, but the real lesson was that politicians and other government insiders are very prone to corruption.

Well, it’s happened again. Thieves stole millions of documents (the “Pandora Papers”) from various firms around the world that specialize in cross-border investment.

Some journalists want us to believe that these documents are scandalous, but I poured cold water on this hysteria in an interview with the BBC.

If you don’t want to listen to me pontificate for about five minutes, here are the main points from the interview.

• International investment is a good thing (much like international trade) and it necessarily requires the use of “offshore” entities such as companies, funds, and bank accounts.
• Politicians don’t like cross-border investment because economic activity tends to migrate to places with lower tax rate, and this puts downward pressure on tax rates.
• There is no evidence that people in the private sector use “offshore” entities in ways that are disproportionately dodgy.
• By contrast, there is considerable evidence that politicians use “offshore” in ways that are disproportionately dodgy.
• More than 99 percent of people engage in legal tax avoidance and that’s a good thing because it keeps money out of the hands of profligate politicians.
• People should not have to share their private financial affairs, such as bank accounts and investment holdings, with the general public.

It’s not worth a separate bullet point, but my favorite part of the interview is when I noted the grotesque hypocrisy of the International Monetary Fund, which pimps for higher taxes all around the world, yet its employees get tax-free salaries.

The bottom line is that tax competition and so-called tax havens should be applauded rather than persecuted.

We should instead be condemning the “tax hells” of the world. Those are the jurisdictions that cause economic misery.

Since we’re on this topic, let’s also enjoy some excerpts from an article in Reason by Steven Greenhut.

Leftists are thrilled by the Biden administration’s plan to stamp out the bogeyman of tax havens—low-tax jurisdictions where corporations and other investors can keep their money away from the prying hands of the government. …Let’s dispense with the outrage about tax havens. There is nothing wrong with companies and individuals that shelter their earnings from governments, which are like organized mobs that can never seize enough revenue. …If you believe that tax havens are immoral, then you should not claim any deductions on your tax bill. President Joe Biden apparently thinks it’s wrong for corporations to locate their headquarters in low-tax Bermuda, Ireland, and Switzerland, yet why does his home of Delaware house so many U.S. corporate headquarters? …Tax havens provide pressure on big-spending governments to limit tax rates, and lower tax rates boost economic activity, create jobs, and incentivize investors to invest more. …Those who oppose tax havens simply want the government to take more money and have more power.

I’ll close by noting that many Nobel Prize-winning economists defend tax competition as a necessary check on the greed of the political class.

P.S. As you can see from this tweet, not everyone appreciated my BBC interview.

P.P.S. There was also a manufactured controversy involving stolen documents back in 2013.

P.P.P. S. My work on this issue has been…umm…interesting, resulting in everything from a front-page attack by the Washington Post to the possibility of getting tossed in a Mexican jail.

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OECD Data: Higher Tax Rates Don’t Necessarily Mean Higher Tax Revenue

I participated in a debate yesterday on “tax havens” for the BBC World Service. If you read last month’s two-part series on the topic (here and here), you already know I’m a big defender of low-tax jurisdictions.

But it’s always interesting to interact with people with a different perspective (in this case, former Obama appointee David Carden and U.K. Professor Rita de la Feria).

As you might imagine, critics generally argue that tax havens should be eliminated so politicians have greater leeway to increase tax rates and finance bigger government. And if you listen to the entire interview, that’s an even bigger part of their argument now that there’s lots of coronavirus-related spending.

But for purposes of today’s column, I want to focus on what I said beginning at 49:10 of the interview.

I opined that it’s reasonably to issue debt to finance a temporary emergency and then gradually reduce the debt burden afterwards (similar to what happened during and after World War II, as well as during other points in history).

The most important part of my answer, however, was the discussion about how revenues didn’t decline when tax rates were slashed beginning in 1980.

Let’s first take a look at what happened to top tax rates for 24 industrialized nations from North America, Western Europe, and the Pacific Rim. As you can see, there’s been a big reduction in tax rates since 1980.

In the interview, I mentioned OECD data about taxes on income and profits, which can be found here (specifically data series 1000). So let’s see what happened to revenues during the period of falling tax rates.

Lo and behold, it turns out that revenue went up. Not just nominal revenues. Not just inflation-adjusted revenues. Tax revenues even increased as a share of gross domestic product.

In part, this is the Laffer Curve in action. Lower tax rates meant better incentives to engage in productive behavior. That meant higher levels of taxable income (the variable that should matter most).

For what it’s worth, I suspect that the lower tax rates – by themselves – did not cause tax revenue to rise. After all, there are many policies that determine the overall vitality of an economy.

But there’s no question that there’s a lot of “revenue feedback” when tax rates are changed.

The bottom line is that the folks advocating higher tax rates shouldn’t expect a windfall of tax revenue if they succeed in imposing class-warfare tax policy.

P.S. For the folks on the left who are motivated by spite rather than greed, it doesn’t matter if higher tax rates generate more money.

P.P.S. Interestingly, both the IMF and OECD have admitted, at least by inference, that lower corporate tax rates don’t result in lower tax revenues.

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Tax Havens Are Good for Growth, Part II

Yesterday’s column focused on the theoretical argument for tax havens.

At the risk of oversimplifying, I explained that the pressure of tax competition was necessary to prevent “stationary bandits” from saddling nations with “goldfish government.”

And I specifically explained why the left’s theory of “capital export neutrality” was only persuasive if people just paid attention to one side of the equation.

Today, let’s look at some real-world evidence to better understand the beneficial role of these international financial centers.

We’ll start with a column in the Hill by Jorge González-Gallarza.

Using as a natural experiment the terminal phase-out in 2006 of corporate tax exemptions to affiliates of U.S. companies setting shop in Puerto Rico, the research finds that scrapping the island’s status as a tax haven led U.S. companies to cut back investments and job creation in the mainland substantially. The provision in question was Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code and it exempted Puerto Rico-based affiliates of U.S. companies from paying any corporate income tax altogether. …In 1996, President Clinton signed the Small Business Job Creation Act, spelling §936’s full phaseout by 2006. …ditching §936 appears to have raised U.S. companies’ average effective tax rate on domestic corporate income by 10 percentage points. Notably yet unsurprisingly, they responded by cutting global investment by a whopping 23 percent while balancing away from domestic projects, in Puerto Rico and the mainland alike — domestic investment fell by 38 percent, with Foreign Direct Investments’ (FDIs) share of the total growing 17.5 percent. …Employing 11 million workers in the continental US before repeal, firms taking advantage of §936 laid off a million of them, amounting to a 9.1 percent decline in payrolls.

In other words, higher taxes on business resulted in less investment and fewer jobs. Gee, what a surprise.

Hopefully, the 2017 reduction in the corporate tax rate is now offsetting some of that damage.

In an article for the Tax Foundation, Elke Asen shares some academic research on how tax havens help mitigate the destructive policies of high-tax governments.

Tax havens, or “offshore financial centers,” can be defined as small, well-governed tax jurisdictions that do not have substantial domestic economic activity and impose low or zero tax rates on foreign investors. By doing so, they attract a considerable amount of capital inflow, particularly from high-tax countries. …academic research reveals that high-tax jurisdictions may also have something to gain from tax havens. …A 2004 paper by economists Mihir Desai, C. Fritz Foley, and James Hines…found that tax havens indirectly stimulate the growth of businesses in non-haven countries located in the same region. …These findings suggest that although high-tax countries can lose tax revenue due to profit shifting, tax havens can indirectly facilitate economic growth in high-tax countries by reducing the cost of financing investment in those countries.

By the way, I cited the Desai-Foley-Hines paper in my video on “The Economic Case for Tax Havens” because it makes the key point that governments hurt their own economies when they go after low-tax jurisdictions.

Here are some excerpts from an article by Abrar Aowsaf in the Bangladesh-based Dhaka Tribune. It’s especially worth citing since it notes that tax havens are a refuge for oppressed people around the world.

A tax haven is basically a jurisdiction with low taxes, high legal security, and a high degree of protection of savers’ privacy. …The Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Jersey, and Bermuda — all of these jurisdictions that we recognize as tax havens are characterized by their high legal safety. Savers know that the government will not decide to take their money on a whim. …Operating in tax havens is not illegal in itself. …Singer Shakira, for example, uses tax havens to minimize her tax bills within the bounds of the law. …Another very important detail is that tax havens are a refuge for millions of citizens who have had the misfortune of being born in authoritarian and unstable countries. In many countries, the most basic human rights are not guaranteed. There also exist states where authoritarian governments arbitrarily decide who to repress or prosecute. Many investors do not seek protection just for the lower taxes, but they are also escaping political, ideological, and religious persecution. …In reality, tax havens are not to be blamed…nor do they force us to pay more taxes or harm our economies. Ireland, for example, was poorer than Spain in 1980. Today, thanks to its low taxes, it is the second richest country in the Eurozone. In order to improve general welfare, what we need are more companies, not more incompetent politicians and haphazard public spending. The problems faced by countries with economic difficulties do not come from tax havens, but from their politicians and ineffective policies.

Amen. More people need to be making “The Moral Case for Tax Havens.”

Andy Morriss, the Dean of Texas A&M’s School of Innovation, explains the vital role of these low-tax jurisdictions in bring more investment and prosperity to poor nations.

The seemingly endless debate over the role of IFCs in corporate and personal tax avoidance ignores these jurisdictions’ crucial role in providing the rule of law for international transactions. …The world’s poorest countries desperately need their economies to grow if their populations are to have better lives. For example, Africa has about 17 per cent of the world’s population but only 3 per cent of global GDP. The root causes of African nations’ underdevelopment are complex, but one critical element is that there is too little investment in their economies. …most developing countries lack the legal and regulatory infrastructure necessary to support a domestic capital market. …When multiple investors pool their investments, they need a mechanism to address the governance of their pooled investment. …By providing legal systems which offer a powerful combination of modern, efficient, well-designed laws and regulations, regulatory agencies staffed with experienced, well-credentialed experts, and court systems capable of quick, fair, and thoughtful decisions, IFCs offer alternative locations for transactions and entities. …In short, the price of investing in a developing economy is reduced.  And when the price of something falls, the amount demanded increases. That’s good for investors, it’s good for developing countries, and it’s good for the world’s poorest. …Improving the lives of the poorest around the world is going to require massive private investment in productive activities. This need cannot be met by government provided aid… Only economic growth can solve this problem. And growth requires investment… Fortunately, IFCs are helping to meet this need.

Click here if you want more information on how tax havens help the developing world.

Writing for the Bahamas-based Tribune and citing former Finance Minister James Smith, Neil Hartnell warns that the OECD’s agenda of “neo-colonialism” will cripple his nation’s economy.

The Bahamas “may devastate the economy” if it surrenders too easily to demands from high-tax European nations for a corporate income tax, a former finance minister warned yesterday. …OECD and European Union (EU) initiatives…calling for all nations to impose some form of “minimum level of” taxation on the activities of multinational entities. …Mr Smith…blasted the OECD’s European members for seemingly seeking to “recast our economy in their own image”, adding that this nation’s economic model had worked well for 50 years without income and other direct forms of taxation. …Describing the OECD and EU pressures as a form of “neo-colonialism”, Mr Smith said The Bahamas shared few economic characteristics with their members. He pointed out that this nation was suffering from high unemployment and “low wages for the majority” of Bahamians. “Conceptually the take from an income tax may devastate the economy,” he told Tribune Business.

The former Finance Minister is correct in that the OECD is trying to export its high-tax policies.

For what it’s worth, I’ve reversed the argument and pointed out that OECD nations should be copying zero-income tax jurisdictions such as the Bahamas.

So what’s the argument against tax havens?

As illustrated by this article from the International Monetary Fund, authored by Jannick Damgaard, Thomas Elkjaer, and Niels Johannesen, all the complaints revolve around the fact that some people don’t like it when governments can’t grab as much money.

Although Swiss Leaks, the Panama Papers, and recent disclosures from the offshore industry have revealed some of the intricate ways multinational firms and wealthy individuals use tax havens to escape paying their fair share, the offshore financial world remains highly opaque. …These questions are particularly important today in countries where policy initiatives aiming to curb the harmful use of tax havens abound. …a new study…finds that a stunning $12 trillion…consists of financial investment passing through empty corporate shells… These investments in empty corporate shells almost always pass through well-known tax havens. The eight major pass-through economies—the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Hong Kong SAR, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Ireland, and Singapore—host more than 85 percent of the world’s investment in special purpose entities, which are often set up for tax reasons. …private individuals also use tax havens on a grand scale… Globally, individuals hold about $7 trillion—corresponding to roughly 10 percent of world GDP—in tax havens. …the stock of offshore wealth ranges…to about 50 percent in some oil-producing countries, such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, and in countries that have suffered instances of major financial instability, such as Argentina and Greece.

I find it interesting that even the pro-tax IMF felt obliged to acknowledge that people living in nations with bad governments are especially likely to make use of tax havens.

Though I’m not sure I fully trust the data in this chart from the article.

Because of problems such as corruption, expropriation, crime, and political persecution, I’m sure that usage of tax havens by people in nations such as China, India, Iran, Mexico, and South Africa is much greater than what we see in the chart.

Though perhaps the numbers are distorted because the authors didn’t include the United States (sadly, the policies that make the U.S. a tax haven are only available for foreigners).

P.S. American taxpayers legally can use Puerto Rico as a tax haven.

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Tax Havens Are Good for Growth, Part I

As part of my presentation earlier this month to IES Europe, I discussed topics such as comparative economics and federalism.

I also had a chance to explain why tax havens are good for global prosperity.

Many of the points I made will be familiar to regular readers.

1. Because politicians have been worried that the “geese with the golden eggs” can escape – thanks to tax havens and tax competition – governments around the world reluctantly have lowered tax rates and reduced discriminatory taxes on saving and investment.

2. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (heavily subsidized by American taxpayers) is a bureaucracy that is controlled by high-tax governments and it seeks to undermine tax competition and tax havens by creating a global tax cartel – sort of an “OPEC for politicians.”

3. When tax competition is weakened, politicians respond by increasing tax rates.

4. There is an economic theory that is used to justify tax harmonization. It’s called “capital export neutrality” and I shared a slide in the presentation to show why CEN doesn’t make sense. Here’s a new version of the slide, which I’ve augmented to help people understand why tax havens and tax competition are good for prosperity.

The bottom line is that we should fight to protect tax havens and tax competition. The alternative is “stationary bandits” and “Goldfish Government.”

P.S. My work on this issue has been…umm…interesting, resulting in everything from a front-page attack by the Washington Post to the possibility of getting tossed in a Mexican jail.

P.S.S. This column has four videos on the issue of tax competition, and this column has five videos on the issue of tax havens.

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The Destructive Impact of Wealth Taxation

When I wrote about the wealth tax early this year, I made three simple points.

• A war on wealth is a war on capital (increased double taxation is needed since rich people have a lot of saving and investment).
• A war on capital is a war on productivity (every economic theory agrees there is no added output without saving and investment).
• A war on productivity is a war on workers (every economic theory agrees that there is a link between wages and how much workers produce).

I obviously have not been very persuasive.

At least in certain quarters.

A story in the Wall Street Journal explores the growing interest on the left in this new form of taxation.

The income tax..system could change fundamentally if Democrats win the White House and Congress. …Democrats want to shift toward taxing their wealth, instead of just their salaries and the income their assets generate. …At the end of 2017, U.S. households had $3.8 trillion in unrealized gains in stocks and investment funds, plus more in real estate, private businesses and artwork… Democrats are eager to tap that mountain of wealth to finance priorities such as expanding health-insurance coverage, combating climate change and aiding low-income households. …The most ambitious plan comes from Sen. Warren of Massachusetts, whose annual wealth tax would fund spending proposals such as universal child care and student-loan forgiveness. …rich would pay whether they make money or not, whether they sell assets or not and whether their assets are growing or shrinking.

The report includes this comparison of current law with various soak-the-rich proposals (click here for my thoughts on the Wyden plan).

The article does acknowledge that there are some critiques of this class-warfare tax proposal.

European countries tried—and largely abandoned—wealth taxes. …For an investment yielding a steady 1.5% return, a 2% wealth levy would be equivalent to an income-tax rate above 100% and cause the asset to shrink. …The wealth tax also has an extra asterisk: it would be challenged as unconstitutional.

The two economists advising Elizabeth Warren, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, have a new study extolling the ostensible benefits of a wealth tax.

I want to focus on their economic arguments, but I can’t resist starting with an observation that I was right when I warned that the attack on financial privacy and the assault on so-called tax havens was a precursor to big tax increases.

Indeed, Saez and Zucman explicitly argue this is a big reason to push their punitive new wealth tax.

European countries were exposed to tax competition and tax evasion through offshore accounts, in a context where until recently there was no cross-border information sharing. …offshore tax evasion can be fought more effectively today than in the past, thanks to recent breakthrough in cross-border information exchange, and wealth taxes could be applied to expatriates (for at least some years), mitigating concerns about tax competition. …Cracking down on offshore tax evasion, as the US has started doing with FATCA, is crucial.

Now that I’m done patting myself on the back for my foresight (not that it took any special insight to realize that politicians were attacking tax competition in order to grab more money), let’s look at what they wrote about the potential economic impact.

A potential concern with wealth taxation is that by reducing large wealth holdings, it may reduce the capital stock in the economy–thus lowering the productivity of U.S. workers and their wages. However, these effects are likely to be dampened in the case of a progressive wealth tax for two reasons. First, the United States is an open economy and a significant fraction of U.S. saving is invested abroad while a large fraction of U.S. domestic investment is financed by foreign saving. Therefore, a reduction in U.S. savings does not necessarily translate into a large reduction in the capital stock used in the United States. …Second, a progressive wealth tax applies to only the wealthiest families. For example, we estimated that a wealth tax above $50 million would apply only to about 10% of the household wealth stock. Therefore increased savings from the rest of the population or the government sector could possibly offset any reduction in the capital stock. …A wealth tax would reduce the financial payoff to extreme cases of business success, but would it reduce the socially valuable innovation that can be associated with such success? And would any such reduction exceed the social gains of discouraging extractive wealth accumulation? In our assessment the effect on innovation and productivity is likely to be modest, and if anything slightly positive.

I’m not overly impressed by these two arguments.

1. Yes, foreign savings could offset some of the damage caused by the new wealth tax. But it’s highly likely that other nations would copy Washington’s revenue grab. Especially now that it’s easier for governments to track money around the world.
2. Yes, it’s theoretically possible that other people may save more to offset the damage caused by the new wealth tax. But why would that happen when Warren and other proponents want to give people more goodies, thus reducing the necessity for saving and personal responsibility?

By the way, they openly admit that there are Laffer Curve effects because their proposed levy will reduce taxable activity.

With successful enforcement, a wealth tax has to deliver either revenue or de-concentrate wealth. Set the rates low (1%) and you get revenue in perpetuity but little (or very slow) de-concentration. Set the rates medium (2-3%) and you get revenue for quite a while and de-concentration eventually. Set the rates high (significantly above 3%) and you get de-concentration fast but revenue does not last long.

Now let’s look at experts from the other side.

In a column for Bloomberg, Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute takes aim at Elizabeth Warren’s bad math.

Warren’s plan would augment the existing income tax by adding a tax on wealth. …The tax would apply to fortunes above $50 million, hitting them with a 2% annual rate; there would be a surcharge of 1% per year on wealth in excess of $1 billion. …Not only would such a tax be very hard to administer, as many have pointed out. It likely won’t collect nearly as much revenue as Warren claims. …Under Warren’s proposal, the fair market value of all assets for the wealthiest 0.06% of households would have to be assessed every year. It would be difficult to determine the market value of partially held private businesses, works of art and the like… This helps to explain why the number of countries in the high-income OECD that administer a wealth tax fell from 14 in 1996 to only four in 2017. …It is highly unlikely that the tax would yield the $2.75 trillion estimated by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the University of California, Berkeley, professors who are Warren’s economic advisers. Lawrence Summers, the economist and top adviser to the last two Democratic presidents, and University of Pennsylvania professor Natasha Sarin…convincingly argued Warren’s plan would bring in a fraction of what Saez and Zucman expect once real-world factors like tax avoidance…are factored in. …economists Matthew Smith, Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick present preliminary estimates suggesting that the Warren proposal would raise half as much as projected.

But a much bigger problem is her bad economics.

…a household worth $50 million would lose 2% of its wealth every year to the tax, or 20% over the first decade. For an asset yielding a steady 1.5% return, a 2% wealth tax is equivalent to an income tax of 133%. …And remember that the wealth tax would operate along with the existing income tax system. The combined (equivalent income) tax rate would often be well over 100%. Underlying assets would routinely shrink. …The tax would likely reduce national savings, resulting in less business investment in the U.S… Less investment spending would reduce productivity and wages to some extent over the longer term.

Strain’s point is key. A wealth tax is equivalent to a very high marginal tax rate on saving and investment.

Of course that’s going to have a negative effect.

Chris Edwards, in a report on wealth taxes, shared some of the scholarly research on the economic effects of the levy.

Because wealth taxes suppress savings and investment, they undermine economic growth. A 2010 study by Asa Hansson examined the relationship between wealth taxes and economic growth across 20 OECD countries from 1980 to 1999. She found “fairly robust support for the popular contention that wealth taxes dampen economic growth,” although the magnitude of the measured effect was modest. The Tax Foundation simulated an annual net wealth tax of 1 percent above $1.3 million and 2 percent above $6.5 million. They estimated that such a tax would reduce the U.S. capital stock in the long run by 13 percent, which in turn would reduce GDP by 4.9 percent and reduce wages by 4.2 percent. The government would raise about $20 billion a year from such a wealth tax, but in the long run GDP would be reduced by hundreds of billions of dollars a year.Germany’s Ifo Institute recently simulated a wealth tax for that nation. The study assumed a tax rate of 0.8 percent on individual net wealth above 1 million euros. Such a wealth tax would reduce employment by 2 percent and GDP by 5 percent in the long run. The government would raise about 15 billion euros a year from the tax, but because growth was undermined the government would lose 46 billion euros in other revenues, resulting in a net revenue loss of 31 billion euros. The study concluded, “the burden of the wealth tax is practically borne by every citizen, even if the wealth tax is designed to target only the wealthiest individuals in society.”

The last part of the excerpt is key.

Yes, the tax is a hassle for rich people, but it’s the rest of us who suffer most because we’re much dependent on a vibrant economy to improve our living standards.

My contribution to this discussion it to put this argument in visual form. Here’s a simply depiction of how income is generated in our economy.

Now here’s the same process, but with a wealth tax.

For the sake of argument, as you can see from the letters that have been fully or partially erased, I assumed the wealth tax would depress the capital stock by 10 percent and that this would reduce national income by 5 percent.

I’m not wedded to these specific numbers. Both might be higher (especially in the long run), both might be lower (at least in the short run), or one of them might be higher or lower.

What’s important to understand is that rich people won’t be the only ones hurt by this tax. Indeed, this is a very accurate criticism of almost all class-warfare taxes.

The bottom line is that you can’t punish capital without simultaneously punishing labor.

But some of our friends on the left – as Margaret Thatcher noted many years ago – seem to think such taxes are okay if rich people are hurt by a greater amount than poor people.

P.S. Since I mentioned foresight above, I was warning about wealth taxation more than five years ago.

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The Case for Tax Competition

Why do I relentlessly defend tax competition and tax havens?

Sadly, it’s not because I have money to protect. Instead, I’m motivated by a desire to protect the world from “goldfish government.”

Simply stated, politicians have a “public choice” incentive for never-ending expansions of government, even if they actually understand such policies will lead to Greek-style collapse.

Speaking at a recent conference in Moldova, I explained why tax competition is the best hope for averting that grim outcome.

In my remarks, I basically delivered a results-based argument for tax competition.

Which is why I shared data on lower tax rates and showed these slides on what politicians want compared to what they’ve been pressured to deliver.

Likewise, I also talked about reductions in the tax bias against saving and investment and shared these slides on what politicians want compared to what they’ve been pressured to deliver.

There’s also a theoretical side to the debate about tax competition and tax havens.

In a 2013 article for Cayman Financial Review, I explained (fairly, I think) the other side’s theory.

…there also has been a strain of academic thought hostile to tax competition. It’s called “capital export neutrality” and advocates of the “CEN” approach assert that tax competition creates damaging economic distortions. They start with the theoretical assumption of a world with no taxes. They then hypothesize, quite plausibly, that people will allocate resources in that world in ways that maximise economic output. They then introduce “real world” considerations to the theory, such as the existence of different jurisdictions with different tax rates. In this more plausible world, advocates of CEN argue that the existence of different tax rates will lead some taxpayers to allocate at least some resources for tax considerations rather than based on the underlying economic merit of various options. In other words, people make less efficient choices in a world with multiple tax regimes when compared to the hypothetical world with no taxes. To maximise economic efficiency, CEN proponents believe taxpayers should face the same tax rates, regardless of where they work, save, shop or invest. …One of the remarkable implications of capital export neutrality is that tax avoidance and tax evasion are equally undesirable. Indeed, the theory is based on the notion that all forms of tax planning are harmful and presumably should be eliminated.

And I then explained why I think the CEN theory is highly unrealistic.

…the CEN is flawed for reasons completely independent from preferences about the size of government. Critics point out that capital export neutrality is based on several highly implausible assumptions. The CEN model, for instance, assumes that taxes are exogenous – meaning that they are independently determined. Yet the real-world experience of tax competition shows that tax rates are very dependent on what is happening in other jurisdictions. Another glaring mistake is the assumption that the global stock of capital is fixed – and, more specifically, the assumption that the capital stock is independent of the tax treatment of saving and investment. Needless to say, these are remarkably unrealistic conditions.

Since economists like numbers, I even created an equation to illustrate whether tax competition is a net plus or a net minus.

Basically, the CEN argument is only defensible if the economic inefficiency associated with tax minimization is greater than the economic damage caused by higher tax rates, plus the damage caused by more double taxation, plus the damage caused by a bigger public sector.

Needless to say, honest empirical analysis will never support the CEN approach (as even the OECD admits).

That being said, politicians and special interests are not overly sympathetic to my arguments.

Which is why I very much identify with the guy in this cartoon strip.

P.S. If you want more information, about 10 years ago, I narrated a video on tax competition, a three-part video series on tax havens, and even a video debunking some of Obama’s demagoguery on the topic.

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The Cayman Islands: A Role Model for Harmony and Prosperity

I’m currently in the Cayman Islands, which is one of my favorite places since – like Bermuda, Monaco, Vanuatu, Antigua and Barbuda, and a few other lucky places in the world – it has no income tax.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the absence of an income tax has helped make the Cayman Islands very prosperous, 14th-richest in the world according to the latest data from the World Bank on per-capita economic output (top 10 in the world if you exclude oil-rich jurisdictions).

This does not mean, incidentally, that economic policy is perfect in the Cayman Islands.

There is a overly large and excessively compensated government bureaucracy. Indeed, financing the civil service is becoming such a burden that the Cayman Islands almost made a suicidal decision to impose an income tax earlier this decade.

And the absence of an income tax doesn’t mean an absence of taxes. Here’s a chart from a 2010 report on the jurisdiction’s fiscal challenges. Yes, the tax burden is low compared to many nations, but the government nonetheless collects plenty of revenue from import duties, fees on financial services, and tourism.

But the key thing to understand is that not all taxes are created equal. Some levies impose much more damage than others.

Richard Rahn, a fellow member of the Cayman Financial Review editorial board, explained this insight a few years ago in a column for the Washington Times.

Cayman is prosperous… Critics of Cayman and other offshore financial centers call them “tax havens,” ignoring the fact that they all have many taxes, particularly on consumption — which is good tax policy — rather than on productive labor and capital — which is bad tax policy. The statist political actors in the high-tax jurisdictions will not admit that people do not work, save and invest if they are going to be overly taxed and otherwise abused by their own governments.

And it’s also worth noting that the Cayman Islands are a role model for racial tranquility.

There are people from 135 nations and “mixed” is the largest racial category.

Here are some excerpts from a column published by Forbes about the progressive social structure of the Cayman Islands.

Somebody recently said to me “The Cayman Islands is just a mailbox.”  I started wondering if that was fair. The Cayman Islands are a real places where people live.  And they are not all attorneys and accountants, although they do have more than their fair share.  …a big upside to the Caymans. …Mr. Leung, who is of Asian descent, noticed a whiff of it in Scotland, but finds the Caymans utterly devoid of racism.  Pirates, refugees, shipwrecked sailors and enslaved people might not seem to be the best material to start a country to some, but clearly there is an upside.

I’ll close by noting that there is some trouble in paradise.

The Cayman Islands faces unrelenting pressure from international bureaucracies and high-tax nations. There is a lot of resentment because the jurisdiction is so successful.

The Cayman Islands will not be bullied by countries that cannot compete with this jurisdiction on a level playing field, Premier Alden McLaughlin told an audience… He said that despite the Cayman government’s cooperation on international standards, the Netherlands and others are more concerned about the zero tax rate here. …“But we will not be bullied by those who are jealous of our success, resentful of our tax policies and unable to compete with us on a level playing field,” McLaughlin said.

What makes these attacks so ironic and unfair is that the Cayman Islands actually has much tougher standards than “onshore” nations such as the United States and United Kingdom.

Since I began this column by looking at World Bank data on the most prosperous, let’s wrap up by perusing the U.N.’s numbers.

Hmmm…, lots of so-called tax havens are on this list. I wonder if we can draw any conclusions?

Folks on the left have accused me of “trading with the enemy” for supporting these jurisdictions, but the real story is that we should emulate rather than prosecute these low-tax jurisdictions.

P.S. My affection for the Cayman Islands is mutual.

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What’s the Best Way of Boosting Tax Compliance, Lower Tax Rates or More Oppressive Enforcement?

My long-running feud with the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development could be categorized as a fight over tax compliance.

The bureaucrats at the OECD say that financial privacy must be eviscerated and the fiscal sovereignty must be wiped out so that high-tax governments can track and tax money around the world.

My view is that pro-growth reforms like the flat tax would be a much better approach. With a simple and fair tax code that doesn’t impose extra layers of tax on saving and investment, the IRS no longer would need to know about our bank accounts or investment funds – regardless of whether they are based in Geneva, Illinois, or Geneva, Switzerland.

Though I view better compliance as a secondary benefit. My main goal is to have a tax system that doesn’t impose needlessly high levels of economic damage.

But let’s stick with the compliance issue. Writing for E21, Daniel Di Martino explains that the Italian government makes evasion and avoidance a preferable option because tax rates are too onerous.

Italy’s problem, similar to many of its southern-European neighbors, is an oppressively high tax burden, irresponsible welfare programs that encourage high measured unemployment and increase the debt, and high levels of regulation. …the share of average wages collected by the Italian government via income and social security taxes is among the highest in the OECD at 48 percent. In addition, Italy imposes a value-added tax of 22 percent on most goods and services, one of the highest in Europe. Plus, Italy’s corporate, capital gains, gift, and myriad other taxes are passed on to individuals and borne directly by workers. These high taxes lead to a growing shadow economy, where people underreport work to avoid paying taxes. …many estimates point to more than  $175 billion (€150 billion) in lost tax revenue.

So what’s the best way of addressing that nation’s huge shadow economy?

Simple, less government.

Instead of cracking down on tax evasion and the shadow economy, Italy’s new government needs to rethink long-standing policies to bring a real economic recovery. Taxes need to be lowered so more businesses open and already-existing businesses and individuals come out of the shadows, broadening the tax base and raising revenue. This would allow those in the shadow economy to expand their businesses. Additionally, the welfare state should be trimmed so that people do not have an incentive to stay unemployed and young Italians are less burdened by government debt. Moreover, Italy needs to become more competitive by slashing the number of regulations.

The Institut Economique Molinari in Belgium took a look at the same issue, but included data for all European Union nations.

Economic reasoning and international experience point invariably to common causes that consistently create obstacles to dealings in the official economy: prohibitions, compulsory levies and specific tax measures, as well as fastidious and complex regulations. …As noted by two specialists, “In almost all studies, one of the most important causes (…) is the rise of the tax and social security burdens.” The higher these burdens on labour relations and dealings in the official economy, the less profitable these dealings become and the greater the incentive to trade on the black market. …As long as taxes account for a high share of the final price, opportunities for profit are provided in the underground economy, which moves in on a long‐term basis and comes to account for a significant share of countrywide sales. …Increasing this tax burden can only increase the disconnection between the real production cost of goods and their price on the official market, to such a degree that consumers begin abandoning the official market on a larger scale.

So what’s the answer?

Definitely not more government.

Given the scope of the underground economy, public authorities generally suggest toughening the means of repression so as to collect more tax revenues. The justification for this repression remains the same: it would promote the transfer of all under ground activity to the legal market, thereby creating new tax revenues. Beyond the cost of this repression in terms of resources and bureaucratisation of the economy, this reasoning and the resulting forecasts are erroneous. Though certain activities may no longer be undertaken in the underground economy, they will not be undertaken in the official economy either — in part or even in whole, depending on the specific case — because of the burden of compulsory levies and regulations. …Increased repression by the public authorities, without any change in regulatory and tax frameworks, risks simply destroying economic activities and the associated revenues. The only long‐lasting solution for ending the underground economy consists of dealing with the causes that give rise to it and thus to free the official market from its fiscal and regulatory burdens. …there is no other choice but to lighten tax and regulatory burdens.

Let’s now cross to this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

In an editorial about the current and former Treasury Secretary and their Cayman investments, the Wall Street Journal highlighted hypocrisy. But the best part was the conclusion about bad government policy driving money away from America.

Mr. Mnuchin served as director of Dune Capital, an investment firm he said he registered in the Caymans primarily to “accommodate nonprofits and pensions that want to invest through these off-shore entities.” By contrast, Mr. Lew was personallyinvested in the Citigroup Venture Capital International Growth Partnership II. You know, like that evil profiteer Mitt Romney, the subject of a now infamous Barack Obama campaign ad scoring Mr. Romney for profiting from money in offshore havens such as the Caymans. Mr. Lew’s Cayman company even used the same Ugland House building in the Caymans that President Obama so famously trashed as an “outrage” and “tax scam.” …The Democratic goal…seemed to be to get Mr. Mnuchin to admit that investors go to the Caymans to avoid American taxes. Mr. Mnuchin denied it but needn’t have been so shy. The Caymans have no corporate tax rate. The way to deal with the Caymans is not to punish investors who go there but to get rid of the regulations and high tax rates that send capital offshore.

But it’s not just market-friendly organizations that realize high tax burdens bolster the underground economy.

The International Monetary Fund released a study earlier this year on the shadow economy, which is defined as legal activities that are hidden from government.

The shadow economy includes all economic activities which are hidden from official authorities for monetary, regulatory, and institutional reasons. Monetary reasons include avoiding paying taxes and all social security contributions, regulatory reasons include avoiding governmental bureaucracy or the burden of regulatory framework, while institutional reasons include corruption law, the quality of political institutions and weak rule of law. For our study, the shadow economy reflects mostly legal economic and productive activities that, if recorded, would contribute to national GDP.

And what causes people to hide legal activity from government?

Here are some of the factors that drive the shadow economy according to the IMF.

In other words, people are less likely to comply when they have to endure bad government policy.

…in most cases trade openness, unemployment rate, GDP per capita, size of government, fiscal freedom and control of corruption are highly statistically significant.

And the number one bad government policy is high tax rates.

Let’s close by looking at the other side’s arguments.

Earlier this month, I revealed that the OECD finally admitted that it’s anti-tax competition project was motivated by a desire for class warfare and bigger government.

That’s terrible policy, but I give the bureaucrats in Paris credit for finally being honest.

By contrast, I’m not sure what to say about the bureaucrats in Brussels. The European Commission’s idea of an argument is this vapid video, which attempts to convince viewers that 20 percent of what they like is missing because government isn’t collecting more tax revenue.

In reality, of course, the money isn’t “missing.” It’s still in the private sector, where it actually is providing things that people like, rather than financing the stuff politicians like.

P.S. Speaking of vapid arguments from the European Commission, the bureaucrats actually created an online game designed to brainwash kids into supporting higher tax burdens.

P.P.S. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial mentioned Ugland House in the Cayman Islands. That’s the building that featured in some of Barack Obama’s dishonest demagoguery.

P.P.P.S. I’m still mystified that Republicans continue to send our tax dollars to Paris to subsidize the OECD. Actually, I’m not mystified. This is actually a good example of why they’re called the Stupid Party.

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Offshore Finance and Onshore Economics

Since I consider myself the world’s biggest advocate for tax competition and tax havens (even when it’s risky), I’m always on the lookout for new material to share.

So I was delighted to see a new monograph from the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs on the benefits of “offshore” financial centers. Authored by Diego Zuluaga, it explains why low-tax jurisdictions are good news for those of us laboring in less-enlightened places.

Offshore finance serves several purposes, the most salient of which is the efficient allocation of capital. Some of this activity is tax-related, aimed at raising after-tax investment returns. If it were not for offshore jurisdictions, much foreign investment would be vulnerable to double or triple taxation. Because, under such punitive rates of tax, some of this investment would not take place, the existence of offshore centres has real positive effects on economic activity alongside the (plausibly) negative impact on the tax revenue of individual countries. These welfare gains have been amply documented… Beyond their impact on aggregate investment, research shows that the existence of an OFC is associated with better economic outcomes in neighbouring countries. Contrary to the popular narrative, these jurisdictions are well-governed and peaceful. Who, after all, would wish to use intermediaries in places where investors were regularly expropriated or harassed? …It is difficult to imagine the process of globalisation that has taken place over the last fifty years, bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, happening without the robust financial and legal framework which offshore jurisdictions provide for investment. It would be counterproductive, for both the developing and the rich world, to undermine their essential functions. …Clamping down on offshore centres…would make societies less productive and prosperous, and this effect would compound over time.

He provides some fiscal history, including the fact that government used to be very small in the industrialized world (indeed, that’s one of the big reasons why today’s rich nations got that way).

And he notes that low-tax jurisdictions became more important to global commerce as governments adopted dirigiste policies.

Before World War I, governments played only a small role in economic activity, rarely taking up shares of national income in excess of 15 per cent during peacetime. After the Great War, they took upon themselves ever larger fiscal and administrative functions, notably trade restrictions and capital controls. …In a context of punitive marginal tax rates, constrained capital movements…, OFCs were vital to the revival of cross-border trade and investment after World War II. Without stable intermediary jurisdictions with robust rule of law and low taxation, much international investment would have been too costly, whether because of the associated tax burden or the risks of expropriation and inflation.

Zuluaga notes that tax competition ties the hands of politicians.

Theory and evidence suggest that countries may have any two of free capital mobility, an independent tax policy and no tax competition (Figure 2). But they cannot have all three.

And here is the aforementioned Figure 2 from the report.

I wrote about a version of the tax trilemma two years ago and noted that there’s only a problem if a country has high taxes.

So I made the following correction.

Returning to the article, Zuluaga points out that low-tax jurisdictions have a much better track record in the fight against bad behavior than high-tax nations.

OFCs are neither the original source nor the ultimate destination of illegal financial flows. So long as there remain corrupt politicians, drug users and people willing to engage in terrorist acts, history suggests that some illegal financial activity will take place to make it possible. Furthermore, as we saw above, OFCs are as a rule far more compliant and transparent in their prevention of unlawful activities than onshore jurisdictions, including the United States and the United Kingdom.

Zuluaga concludes with a warning about how the attack on tax havens is really an attack on globalization. And the global economy will suffer if the statists prevail.

…an ominous alliance of revenue-greedy politicians, ideological campaigners and rent-seekers has emerged in recent years. Gradually, but relentlessly, they aim to dismantle the liberal financial order of which free capital movement is a fundamental component. …the alliance’s real goal: to eliminate tax competition and constrain the movement of capital in order to bring it under their control. The consequences of this effort would be long-standing and go far beyond a few tiny offshore financial centres.

Excellent points. I strongly recommend reading the entire publication.

Though I’m not sure Zuluaga and I agree on everything. His article notes, seemingly with approval, that offshore jurisdictions largely have agreed to help enforce the bad tax laws of onshore nations. Yet that’s a recipe for the application of more double taxation on income that is saved and invested, which he acknowledges is a bad thing.

In other words, I think financial privacy is a good thing since predatory governments are less likely to misbehave if they know taxpayers have safe (and confidential) places to put their money. Now that privacy has been weakened, however, anti-tax competition folks at the OECD are openly chortling that there can be higher taxes on capital.

The bottom line is that tax competition without privacy is not very effective. I wonder if Zuluaga understands and agrees.

Another IEA author, Richard Teather, got that key point.

In a 2005 monograph, he explained the vital role of financial privacy.

Although the country of residence may theoretically impose taxes on foreign income, it can only do so practically if its tax authorities have knowledge of that income. It is therefore common for tax havens to have strong privacy laws that protect investors’ personal information from enquirers (including foreign tax authorities). The best-known of these was Switzerland, which introduced banking secrecy to protect Jewish customers from Nazi confiscation, and there remains a genuine strong feeling in many of these countries that privacy is about more than just tax avoidance.

But I’m digressing. Since we’ve looked at one U.K.-based defense of low-tax jurisdictions, let’s also look at some excerpts from a column by Matthew Lynn in the London-based Spectator.

He makes a very interesting point about how so-called tax havens are basically the financial equivalent of free zones for goods.

…in a globalised economy, offshore finance plays an important role, enabling money to move across borders relatively easily. Rather oddly, a lot of the media seem to have decided that while it is fine for people and goods to move around the world, having a bank account or an investment in a different country makes you virtually a criminal. …The world already has an extensive network of free ports, tax-free zones where goods in transit can be processed or temporarily stored without having to pay local tariffs. There are an estimated 3,500 of them across 135 countries, facilitating the movement of goods around the world. They have helped trade grow hugely over the past couple of decades. Offshore centres…are now mainly financial ‘free ports’ — places where cash can easily be parked and transferred as it moves around the world.

He also makes a very important observation about how the theft of data leading to the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers revealed very little illegal behavior.

…one of the interesting things about the leaks is not how much wrongdoing they expose, but how little. Take last year’s Panama Papers scandal, for example. …For all the drama, it was pretty small beer. The reason? All the data revealed might have been interesting, and made for some lurid headlines, but very few people turned out to be breaking any laws. In only a handful of cases were taxes being evaded or money-laundered.

Which is a point I’ve made as well.

And here’s his conclusion.

…it turns out that offshore centres are used by just about everyone. Most pension funds use them, including those looking after the savings of the politicians queuing up to condemn them. They are part of the infrastructure of globalisation, as much as the container ships, airports and fibre optic cables. It is ironic that many of the same people who proudly describe themselves as citizens of the world think that applies to everything except money.

Amen. Once again, this is really a fight about globalization. Or, to be more accurate, a fight between good globalism and bad globalism.

To wrap up, here’s the video I narrated for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity on the economic benefits of tax havens.

P.S. I’ve previously cited other tax haven-related research and analysis from the United Kingdom, most notably from Allister Heath, Dan Hannan, Philip Booth, Godfrey Bloom, and Mark Field.

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Pope Francis Endorses Slower Growth and More Poverty

I almost feel guilty when I criticize the garbled economic thoughts of Pope Francis. After all, he was influenced by Peronist ideology as a youngster, so he was probably a lost cause from the beginning.

Moreover, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have already dissected his irrational ramblings on economics and explained that free markets are better for the poor. Especially when compared to government dependency.

But since Pope Francis just attacked tax havens, and I consider myself the world’s foremost defender of these low-tax jurisdictions, I can’t resist adding my two cents. Here’s what the Wall Street Journal just reported about the Pope’s ideological opposition to market-friendly tax systems.

The Vatican denounced the use of offshore tax havens… The document, which was released jointly by the Vatican’s offices for Catholic doctrine and social justice, echoed past warnings by Pope Francis over the dangers of unbridled capitalism. …The teaching document, which was personally approved by the pope, suggested that greater regulation of the world’s financial markets was necessary to contain “predatory and speculative” practices and economic inequality.

He even embraced global regulation, not understanding that this increases systemic risk.

“The supranational dimension of the economic system makes it easy to bypass the regulations established by individual countries,” the Vatican said. “The current globalization of the financial system requires a stable, clear and effective coordination among various national regulatory authorities.”

And he said that governments should have more money to spend.

A section of the document was dedicated to criticizing offshore tax havens, which it said contribute to the “creation of economic systems founded on inequality,” by depriving nations of legitimate revenue.

Wow, it’s like the Pope is applying for a job at the IMF or OECD. Or even with the scam charity Oxfam.

In any event, he’s definitely wrong on how to generate more prosperity. Maybe he should watch this video.

Or read Marian Tupy.

Or see what Nobel Prize winners have to say.

P.S. And if the all that doesn’t work, methinks Pope Francis should have a conversation with Libertarian Jesus. He could start here, here, and here.

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The United States Is a Tax Haven for Global Investors…and that’s Good for America

According to bureaucrats at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, so-called tax havens are terrible and should be shut down. Their position is grossly hypocritical since they get tax-free salaries while pushing for higher taxes on everyone else, but not very surprising since the OECD’s membership is dominated by increasingly uncompetitive European welfare states.

Many economists, by contrast, view tax havens favorably since they discourage politicians from over-taxing and over-spending (thus protecting nations from “goldfish government“).

I agree with this economic argument for tax havens, but I also think there’s a very strong moral argument for these jurisdictions since there are so many evil and incompetent governments in the world.

But I don’t want to rehash the argument about the desirability of tax havens in this column. Instead, we’re going to focus on a nation that is becoming the world’s premier “offshore” center.

But it’s not a Caribbean island or a micro-state in Europe.

Instead, as noted in a recent Bloomberg editorial, the United States is now the magnet for global investment.

…the U.S. is becoming one of the world’s best places to hide money from the tax collector. …Congress rejected the Obama administration’s repeated requests to make the necessary changes to the tax code. As a result, the Treasury cannot compel U.S. banks to reveal information such as account balances and names of beneficial owners. The U.S. has also failed to adopt the so-called Common Reporting Standard, a global agreement under which more than 100 countries will automatically provide each other with even more data than FATCA requires. …the U.S. is rapidly becoming the new Switzerland. Financial institutions catering to the global elite, such as Rothschild & Co. and Trident Trust Co., have moved accounts from offshore havens to Nevada, Wyoming and South Dakota. New York lawyers are actively marketing the country as a place to park assets. …From a certain perspective, all this might look pretty smart: Shut down foreign tax havens and then steal their business.

The Economist also identified the U.S. as a haven.

America seems not to feel bound by the global rules being crafted as a result of its own war on tax-dodging. It is also failing to tackle the anonymous shell companies often used to hide money. …All this adds up to “another example of how the US has elevated exceptionalism to a constitutional principle,” says Richard Hay of Stikeman Elliott, a law firm. …America sees no need to join the CRS. …reciprocation is patchy. It passes on names and interest earned, but not account balances; it does not look through the corporate structures that own many bank accounts to reveal the true “beneficial” owner; and data are only shared with countries that meet a host of privacy and technical standards. That excludes many non-European countries. …The Treasury wants more data-swapping and corporate transparency, and has made several proposals to bring America up to the level of the CRS. But most need congressional approval, and politicians are in no rush to enact them. …Meanwhile business lobbyists and states with lots of registered firms, led by Delaware, have long stymied proposed federal legislation that would require more openness in corporate ownership. (Incorporation is a state matter, not a federal one.) …America is much safer for legally earned wealth that is evading taxes… It has shown little appetite for helping enforce foreign tax laws.

And here are some passages from a recent column in Forbes.

…foreign financial institutions are required to report the identities and assets of United States taxpayers to the IRS. Meanwhile, U.S. financial institutions cannot be compelled to reveal the same information to foreign countries. Additionally, the United States has not adopted the Common Reporting Standard. …So, the United States government obtains tax and wealth information from other countries, but fails to share information about what occurs in the U.S. with those other counties. …the U.S. is among the top five best countries for setting up anonymous shell companies. Tax havens deliver a set of benefits including secrecy, potential tax minimization, and the ability of the wealthy to access their monies from anywhere in the world. For a substantial percentage of the global super-rich, the United States is regularly unmatched.

Here’s some of what was reported by the U.K.-based Financial Times.

South Dakota is best known for its vast stretches of flat land and the Mount Rushmore monument… Yet despite its small town feel, Sioux Falls has become a magnet for the ultra-wealthy who set up trusts to protect their fortunes from taxes… Assets held in South Dakotan trusts have grown from $32.8bn in 2006 to more than $226bn in 2014, according to the state’s division of banking. The number of trust companies has jumped from 20 in 2006 to 86 this year. The state’s role as a prairie tax haven has gained unwanted attention… The Boston Consulting Group estimates that there is $800bn of offshore wealth in the US, nearly half of which comes from Latin America. …Bruce Zagaris, a Washington-based lawyer at Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe, says the US offshore industry is even bigger than people realise. “I think the US is already the world’s largest offshore centre. It has done a real good job disabling competition from Swiss banks.”

If this sounds like the United States is hypocritical, that’s a very fair accusation.

Indeed, it was the topic of an entire panel at an Offshore Alert conference. If you have a lot of interest in this topic, here’s the video.

This is an odd issue where I agree with statists (though only with regard to which jurisdictions are “havens”). For instance, the hard-left Tax Justice Network has calculated that the United States is not the biggest offshore jurisdiction. But America is close to the top.

In the TJN’s most-recent Financial Secrecy Index, the United States ranks #2. They think that’s a bad thing (indeed, one of their top people actually asserted that all income belongs to the government), but I’m happy we’ve risen in the rankings.

TJN also has specific details about U.S. law and I think they’ve put together a reasonably accurate summary.

The bottom line is that America is a haven, though it’s probably worth noting that we’ve risen in the rankings mostly because other nations have been coerced into weakening their human rights laws on financial privacy, not because the United States has improved.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, TJN and I part ways on whether it’s good for the United States to be a tax haven.

I already explained at the start of this column why I like tax havens and tax competition. Simply stated, it’s good for taxpayers and the global economy when governments are forced to compete.

But there’s also a good-for-America argument. Here’s the data from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis on indirect investment in the U.S. economy. As you can see, cross-border flows of passive investment have skyrocketed. It’s unknown how much of this increase is due to overall globalization and how much is the result of America’s favorable tax and privacy rules for foreigners.

But there’s no question the U.S. economy benefits enormously from foreigners choosing to invest in America.

All of which helps to explain why it would be a big mistake for the United States to ratify the OECD’s Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters.

Unless, of course, one thinks it would be good to undermine American competitiveness by creating a global tax cartel to enable bigger government.

P.S. The OECD doesn’t like me, but I don’t like them either.

P.P.S. The TJN folks and OECD bureaucrats claim that their goal is to reduce tax evasion. My response is that a global tax cartel is a destructive way of achieving that goal. There’s a much better option available.

P.P.P.S. Rand Paul is one of the few heroes on this issue.

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What’s the Best Reason to Support Tax Havens, Protecting Human Rights or Restraining Greedy Politicians?

The late Mancur Olsen was a very accomplished academic economist who described the unfortunate tendency of vote-seeking governments to behave like “stationary bandits,” seeking to extract the maximum amount of money from taxpayers.

I’m not nearly as sophisticated, so I simply refer to this process as “goldfish government.”

Tax competition is a way of discouraging this self-destructive behavior. Politicians are less likely to over-tax and over-spend if they know that jobs and investment can migrate from high-tax nations to low-tax jurisdictions (borders can be a hassle, but they are beneficial since they presumably represent a limit on the reach of a government’s power).

This is why I’m a big fan of so-called tax havens.

I want politicians to be afraid that the geese with the golden eggs may fly away. This is one of the reasons why “offshore” nations play a very valuable role in the global economy.

But it’s important to realize that there’s also a moral argument for tax havens.

Ask yourself whether you would want the government to have easy access to your nest egg (whether it’s a lot or a little) if you lived in Russia? Or Venezuela? Or China? Or Zimbabwe?

Ask yourself whether you trust the bureaucracy to protect the privacy of your personal financial information if you lived in a country with corruption problems like Mexico? Or India? Or South Africa?

Here’s a story from France24 that underscores my point.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared Sunday that businessmen who move assets abroad are committing “treason”, adding that his government should put an end to the practice. “I am aware that some businessmen are attempting to place their assets overseas. I call on the government not to authorise any such moves, because these are acts of treason,” Erdogan said in televised comments to party members in the eastern town on Mus.

Allow me to translate. What Erdogan is saying is “I don’t want escape options for potential victims of expropriation.” For all intents and purposes, he’s basically whining that he can’t steal money that is held offshore.

Which, of course, is why offshore finance is so important.

Professor Tyler Cowen elaborates in a Bloomberg column.

I’d like to speak up for offshore banking as a significant protection against tyranny and unjust autocracy. It’s not just that many offshore financial institutions, such as hedge funds registered in the Cayman Islands, are entirely legal, but also that the practice of hiding wealth overseas has its upside. …offshore…accounts make it harder for autocratic governments to confiscate resources from their citizens. That in turn limits the potential for tyranny.

Tyler looks at some of the research and unsurprisingly finds that there’s a lot of capital flight from unstable regimes.

A recent study shows which countries are most likely to use offshore banking, as measured by a percentage of their gross domestic product. …The top five countries on this list, measured as a percentage of GDP, are United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Argentina, based on estimates from 2007. In all of those cases the risk of arbitrary political confiscations of wealth is relatively high. …When I consider that list of countries, I don’t think confidential offshore banking is such a bad thing. …consider some of the countries that are not major players in the offshore wealth sweepstakes. China and Iran, for instance, have quite low percentages of their GDPs held in offshore accounts, in part because they haven’t been well integrated into global capital markets. …Are we so sure it would be bad for more Chinese and Iranian wealth to find its way into offshore banks? The upshot would be additional limits on the power of the central leaders to confiscate wealth and to keep political opposition in line.

So what’s the bottom line?

Simple. People need ways of protecting themselves from greedy government.

From the vantage point of Western liberalism, individuals should be free from arbitrary confiscations of their wealth, connected to threats against their life and liberty, even if those individuals didn’t earn all of that wealth justly or honestly. There is even a “takings clause” built into the U.S. Constitution. On top of these moral issues, such confiscations may scare off foreign investment and slow progress toward the rule of law.

By the way, the moral argument shouldn’t be limited to nations with overtly venal governments that engage in wealth expropriation. What about the rights of people in nations – such as Argentina and Greece – where  governments wreck economies because of blind incompetence? Shouldn’t they have the ability to protect themselves from wealth destruction?

I actually raised some of these arguments almost 10 years ago in this video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

P.S. There’s lots of evidence that politicians raise tax rates when tax competition is weakened.

P.P.S. Which is why I’m very happy that Rand Paul is leading the fight against a scheme for a global tax cartel.

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The Problem Is Tax Hells, not Tax Havens

Not everybody appreciates my defense of tax havens.

• A Clinton Administration official accused me of disloyalty to America.
• The OECD threatened to throw me in a Mexican jail.
• A former U.S. Senator said I was guilty of “trading with the enemy.”

I don’t mind these threats and attacks. I figure the other side would ignore me if I wasn’t being at least somewhat effective in the battle to preserve tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy.

That being said, it’s definitely nice to have allies. I’ve cited Nobel laureates who support jurisdictional competition, and also shared great analysis in support of low-tax jurisdictions from top-flight financial writers such as Allister Heath and Pierre Bessard.

Now we have a new video from Sweden’s Johan Norberg. Johan’s latest contribution in his Dead Wrong series is a look at tax havens.

Johan packs an incredible amount of information in an 88-second video.

1. He points out that stolen data from low-tax jurisdictions mostly reveals that politicians are the ones engaging in misbehavior, a point I’ve made when writing about pilfered data from Panama and the British Virgin Islands.
2. He makes the critical point that tax competition “restrains the greed of government,” a point that the New York Times inadvertently confirmed.
3. He also makes the key point that tax havens actually are good for the economies of high-tax nations because they serve as platforms for investment and job creation that otherwise might not occur.
4. Moreover, he notes that the best way to boost tax compliance is by having honest government and low tax rates.

The bottom line is that tax competition and tax havens promote better policy since they discourage politicians from imposing high tax rates and double taxation.

But this isn’t merely an economic and tax issue. There’s also a very strong moral argument for tax havens since those jurisdictions historically have respected the human right of financial privacy.

For those who care about global prosperity, the real target should be tax hells rather than tax havens.

This is a message I will continue to deliver, whether to skeptics in the media or up on Capitol Hill.

P.S. If you prefer an eight-minute video over an 88-second video, here’s my two cents on the importance of tax competition.

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The Most Emotionally Satisfying Argument for Trump’s Corporate Tax Cut

I like the main components of the Trump tax plan, particularly the sweeping reduction in the corporate tax rate.

But, as I say at the beginning of this Fox Business interview, there’s a big difference between proposing a good idea and actually getting legislation approved.

But just because I’m pessimistic, that doesn’t change the fact that a lower tax burden would be good for the country.

Toward the end of the interview, I explained that the most important reason for better tax policy is not necessarily to lower taxes for families, but rather to get more prosperity.

If we can restore the kind of growth we achieved when we had more market-friendly policy in the 1980s and 1990s, that would be hugely beneficial for ordinary people.

That’s the main economic argument for Trump’s plan.

But now I’ve come across what I’ll call the emotionally gratifying argument for Trump’s tax cuts. The Bureau of National Affairs is reporting that European socialists are whining that a lower corporate tax rate in the United States will cause “a race to the bottom.”

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans to slash corporate taxes by more than half will accelerate a “race to the bottom” and undermine global efforts to combat corporate tax evasion by multinationals, according to a second political group in the European Parliament. The Socialists and Democrats, made up of 190 European Parliament lawmakers, insisted the Trump tax reform, announced April 26, threatens the current work in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Group of Twenty to establish a fair and efficient tax system.

As you might expect, the socialists make some nonsensical arguments.

Paul Tang—who heads the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats and leads the European Parliament negotiations on the pending EU Common Corporate Tax Base (CCTB) proposal—accused the Trump administration of pursuing a “beggar-they-neighbor policy similar to those in the 1930s.”

Huh?!? Does Mr. Tang think there were tax cuts in the 1930s?

That was a decade of tax increases, at least in the United States!

Or is he somehow trying to equate tax cuts with protectionism? But that makes zero sense. Yes, protectionism was rampant that decade, but higher tariffs mean higher taxes on trade. That’s the opposite of tax cuts.

Mr Tang is either economically illiterate or historically illiterate. Heck, he’s a socialist, so probably both.

Meanwhile, another European parliamentarian complained that the U.S. would become more of a tax haven if Trump’s tax cut was enacted.

Sven Giegold, a European Green Party member and leading tax expert in the European Parliament, told Bloomberg BNA in a April 27 telephone interview that the Trump tax plan further cemented the U.S. as a tax haven. He added the German government must put the issue on the agenda during its current term as holder of the G-20 presidency. …The European Green Party insists the U.S. has become an international tax haven because, among other things, it has not committed to implement the OECD Common Reporting Standard and various U.S. states, including Delaware, Nevada and South Dakota, have laws that allow companies to hide beneficial owners.

He’s right and wrong.

Yes, the United States is a tax haven, but only for foreigners who passively invest in the American economy (we generally don’t tax interest and capital gains received by foreigners, and we also generally don’t share information about the indirect investments of foreigners with their home governments).

Corporate income, however, is the result of direct investment, and that income is subject to tax by the IRS.

But I suppose it’s asking too much to expect politicians to understand such nuances.

For what it’s worth, I assume Mr. Giegold is simply unhappy that a lower corporate tax rate would make America more attractive for jobs and investment.

Moreover, he presumably understands adoption of Trump’s plan would put pressure on European nations to lower their corporate tax rates. Which is exactly what happened after the U.S. dropped its corporate tax rate back in the 1980s.

Which is yet another example of why tax competition is something that should be celebrated rather than persecuted. It forces politicians to adopt better policy even when they don’t want to.

That is what gets them angry. And I find their angst very gratifying.

P.S. You may have noticed at the very end of the interview that I couldn’t resist interjecting a plea to reduce the burden of government spending. That’s not merely a throwaway line. When the Congressional Budget Office released its fiscal forecast earlier this year, I crunched the numbers and showed that we could balance the budget within 10 years and lower the tax burden by $3 trillion (on a static basis!) if politicians simply restrained spending so that it grew 1.96 percent per year.

P.P.S. It’s worth remembering that the “race to the bottom” is actually a race to better policy and more growth. And politicians should be comforted by the fact that this doesn’t necessarily mean less revenue.

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Oxfam: A Leftist Joke, not a Real Charity

While my colleagues are stuck in the cold of Washington for inauguration week, I’m enjoying a few days in the Caribbean. More specifically, I’m sharing my views today on Trump and the global economy at the annual Business Outlook Conference in the British Virgin Islands.

Yes, another example of the sacrifices I make in the battle for liberty.

But it’s fortuitous that I’m here for reasons other than the weather. This is a good opportunity to expose Oxfam. Many people have a vague impression that this group is a well-meaning charity that seeks to help lift up poor people.

If you take a close look at the organization’s activities, however, you’ll see that it’s become a left-wing pressure group.

Consider, for example, Oxfam’s recent report on “Tax Battles,” which discusses the supposed “dangerous global race to the bottom on corporate tax.”

Based on Oxfam’s ideologically driven agenda, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands are the worst of the worst, followed by the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Singapore. The British Virgin Islands, meanwhile, is number 15 on Oxfam’s list.

And what awful sins did BVI and the other jurisdictions commit to get on the list?

Well, the report suggests that their guilty of helping taxpayers minimize their tax burdens.

To create the list, Oxfam researchers assessed countries against a set of criteria that measured the extent to which countries used three types of harmful tax policies: corporate tax rates, the tax incentives offered, and lack of cooperation with international efforts against tax avoidance.

In other words, places with good business tax policy are ostensibly bad because politicians have less money to waste.

By the way, the folks at Oxfam are grotesquely hypocritical.

The world’s most important jurisdiction for corporate tax planning is Delaware and it didn’t even appear on the list. Why? I have no idea.

But I can tell you that there is a single building in Delaware that is home to 285,000 companies according to a report in the New York Times.

1209 North Orange Street… It’s a humdrum office building, a low-slung affair with a faded awning and a view of a parking garage. Hardly worth a second glance. If a first one. But behind its doors is one of the most remarkable corporate collections in the world: 1209 North Orange, you see, is the legal address of no fewer than 285,000 separate businesses. Its occupants, on paper, include giants like American Airlines, Apple, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Coca-Cola, Ford, General Electric, Google, JPMorgan Chase, and Wal-Mart. These companies do business across the nation and around the world. Here at 1209 North Orange, they simply have a dropbox. …Big corporations, small-time businesses, rogues, scoundrels and worse — all have turned up at Delaware addresses in hopes of minimizing taxes, skirting regulations, plying friendly courts or, when needed, covering their tracks. …It’s easy to set up shell companies here, no questions asked.

Most leftists get upset about Delaware, just like they get upset about BVI and the Cayman Islands.

But Oxfam’s people are either spectacularly clueless or they made some sort of bizarre political calculation to give America a free pass.

For purposes of today’s discussion, however, what matters most is that Oxfam is ideologically hostile to jurisdictions with good policy. The fact that they’re also hypocritical is just icing on the cake.

By the way, putting out shoddy reports is a pattern for the organization.

It recently got a lot of press attention because of a report on “An Economy for the 99 Percent” with the dramatic claim that the world’s 8-richest people have the same wealth as the world’s bottom-50 percent.

Oxfam wants people to somehow conclude that billions of people are poor because those 8 people are rich. But that’s nonsense.

My colleague Johan Norberg has waged a one-man campaign to debunk Oxfam’s shoddy methodology and dishonest implications.

Here are two very clever tweets on the topic.

8 people are richer than 3.6 bn, says Oxfam. So? My daughter, who has $20, is richer than 2 bn. So the problem is poverty, not inequality.

— Johan Norberg (@johanknorberg) January 16, 2017

Amen. Ethical people want to reduce poverty. Envious people want to punish the successful.

And here’s a tweet noting that the classical liberal policies opposed by Oxfam have led to a much better world.

If we don't end neoliberalism we'll see more of what happened in the last 25 years, warns Oxfam. pic.twitter.com/i1CH3dswFY

— Johan Norberg (@johanknorberg) January 17, 2017

And here’s one of his “Dead Wrong” videos on the topic of inequality and poverty.

And since we’re looking at videos, here’s my video on Obama’s anti-tax haven demagoguery.

You’ll notice that 1209 North Orange Street makes a cameo appearance.

The moral of the story is that BVI (and other so-called tax havens) should be applauded, not criticized.

And Oxfam should end the pretense of being a charity. It’s a left-wing hack organization.

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Is Defending Tax Competition Akin to “Trading with the Enemy”?

When I was younger, my left-wing friends said conservatives unfairly attacked them for being unpatriotic and anti-American simply because they disagreed on how to deal with the Soviet Union.

Now the shoe is on the other foot.

Last decade, a Treasury Department official accused me of being disloyal to America because I defended the fiscal sovereignty of low-tax jurisdictions.

And just today, in a story in the Washington Post about the Center for Freedom and Prosperity (I’m Chairman of the Center’s Board of Directors), former Senator Carl Levin has accused me and others of “trading with the enemy” because of our work to protect and promote tax competition.

Here’s the relevant passage.

Former senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.)…said in a recent interview that the center’s activities run counter to America’s values and undermine the nation’s ability to raise revenue. “It’s like trading with the enemy,” said Levin, whose staff on a powerful panel investigating tax havens regularly faced public challenges from the center. “I consider tax havens the enemy. They’re the enemy of American taxpayers and the things we try to do with our revenues — infrastructure, roads, bridges, education, defense. They help to starve us of resources that we need for all the things we do. And this center is out there helping them to accomplish that.”

Before even getting into the issue of tax competition and tax havens and whether it’s disloyal to want limits on the power of governments, I can’t resist addressing the “starve us of resources” comment by Levin.

He was in office from 1979-2015. During that time, federal tax receipts soared from $463 billion to $3.2 trillion. Even if you only count the time the Center for Freedom and Prosperity has existed (created in late 2000), tax revenues have jumped from $2 trillion to $3.2 trillion.

At the risk of understatement, Senator Levin has never been on a fiscal diet. And he wasn’t bashful about spending all that revenue. He received an “F” rating from the National Taxpayers Union every single year starting in 1993.

Let’s now address the main implication of the Washington Post story, which is that it’s somehow wrong or improper for there to be an organization that defends tax competition and fiscal sovereignty, particularly if some of its funding comes from people in low-tax jurisdictions.

The Post offer[s] an inside look at how a little-known nonprofit, listing its address as a post office box in Alexandria, became a persistent opponent of U.S. and global efforts to regulate the offshore world. …the center met again and again with government officials and members of the offshore industry around the world… Quinlan and Mitchell launched the center in October 2000. …The center had two stated goals. Overseas, the center set out to persuade countries on the blacklist not to cooperate with the OECD, which it derided as a “global tax cartel.” In Washington, the center lobbied the Bush administration to withdraw its support for the OECD and also worked to block anti-tax haven legislation on Capitol Hill. To spread the word, the center testified before Congress, published reports and opinion pieces in leading financial publications, and drafted letters to lawmakers and administration officials. Representatives of the center crisscrossed the globe and sponsored discussions in 2000 and 2001, traveling to London, Paris, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, Panama, Barbados and the British Virgin Islands.

To Senator Levin and other folks on the left, I guess this is the fiscal equivalent of “trading with the enemy.”

In reality, this is a fight over whether there should be any limits on the fiscal power of governments. On one side are high-tax governments and international bureaucracies like the OECD, along with their ideological allies. They want to impose a one-size-fits-all model based on the extra-territorial double-taxation of income that is saved and invested, even if it means blacklisting and threatening low-tax jurisdictions (the so-called tax havens).

On the other side are proponents of good tax policy (including many Nobel Prize-winning economists), who believe that income should not be taxed more than one time and that the power to tax should be constrained by national borders.

And, yes, that means we sometimes side with Switzerland or Panama rather than the Treasury Department. Our patriotism is to the ideals of the Founding Fathers, not to the bad tax policy of the U.S. government.

In any event, I’m proud to say that the Center’s efforts have been semi-successful.

In May 2001, the center claimed a key victory. In a dramatic departure from the Clinton administration, Paul O’Neill, the incoming Treasury Secretary appointed by Bush, announced that the United States would back away from the reforms pushed by the OECD. …fewer than half of the nations on the OECD blacklist pledged to become more transparent in their tax systems, a victory for anti-tax forces such as the center.

Even the other side says the Center is effective.

…said Elise Bean, former staff director and chief counsel of Levin’s Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which started investigating tax havens in 2001. “They travel all around the world and they have had a tremendous impact.” …“They were very effective at painting the OECD’s work as end-times are here for tax competition, and we’re going to have European tax rates imposed upon the whole world if the OECD’s work continued,” said Will Davis, the former head of OECD public affairs in Washington.

What’s most impressive is that all this was accomplished with very little funding.

Tax returns for the center and a foundation set up in its name reported receiving at least $1.4 million in revenue from 2003 to 2010.

In other words, the Center and its affiliated Foundation managed to thwart some of the world’s biggest and most powerful governments with a very modest budget averaging about $175,000 per year. And I don’t even get compensation from the Center, even though I’m the one who almost got thrown in a Mexican jail for opposing the OECD!

So while Senator Levin had decades of experience spending other people’s money in a promiscuous fashion, I work for an organization, the Cato Institute, that is ranked as the most cost-effective major think tank, and I’m on the Board of a small non-profit that has a track record of achieving a lot with very little money.

Yet another example of why we should be thankful that tax competition makes it more difficult for politicians to extract more revenue from the economy’s productive sector.

P.S. I mentioned to the Post reporters that the world’s biggest tax haven is the United States, but that important bit of information was omitted from the article. Which is a shame since it would have given me a chance to laud Senator Rand Paul for blocking a very dangerous agreement that would undermine America’s attractive tax laws for overseas investors.

P.P.S. If politicians really want to hurt tax havens, they should adopt a flat tax. That would dramatically boost tax compliance.

P.P.P.S. All things considered, I think the reporters who put together the story were reasonably fair, though there was a bit of editorializing such as referring to one low-tax jurisdiction as a “notorious tax haven.” When they write about France, do they ever refer to it as a “notorious tax hell”?

Also, when writing about trips the Center arranged for congressional staff to low-tax jurisdictions, the article stated, “The staffers reported receiving from $900 to $2,360 for the trips”, which makes it sound as if the staffers got paid. That’s wrong. The sentence should have read, “The staffers reported that the Center’s travel and lodging expenses ranged from $900 to $2,360 for the trips.”

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Lessons from Monaco on the Benefits of Zero Income Tax

I wonder whether October 3, 1913, was the worst day in American history. That’s when one of America’s worst presidents signed into law the income tax.

The top rate was only 7 percent when Woodrow Wilson approved the income tax, and the tax only applied to the very richest Americans. But as is so often the case, taxes on the wealthy are a precursor to taxes on the rest of us.

And that’s exactly what happened and today we’re burden with a grossly unjust and punitive tax code.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve been at a conference in Monaco for the past few days and I’ve seen firsthand how a nation with zero income tax can be a prosperous Mecca (and I’ve also noticed that the Princess of the Levant is far more likely to accompany me on a trip when she has an opportunity to show off a new dress).

No income tax, by the way, means no income tax. Nothing. No capital gains tax, either. The main source of revenue is a value-added tax, generally about 20 percent, along with a tax on business income, but only if a substantial share is earned outside Monaco.

So is this benign tax regime actually conducive to prosperity?

Yes. Here is the data from the United Nations on per-capita economic output. You’ll see several of my favorite places, including the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, Singapore, Switzerland, and Bermuda. But leading the list is Monaco.

By the way, Monaco’s good policy doesn’t just generate domestic prosperity.

It also means some spin-off employment for France.

Every day some 41,000 people come from outside to go to work and all these non-Monegasque nationals, most of whom are French, depend on our economic success. …commerce and the manufacturing also employ significant numbers; over 3,000 workers are, for instance, taken up by the latter.

While Monaco’s per-capita GDP numbers are very impressive, the numbers on per-capita wealth are even more astounding. The average person has more than $1.5 million of assets.

By the way, the unluckiest people in the world are the residents of Roquebrune and Menton in France. That’s because those towns were part of Monaco until the mid-1800s. Now they’re part of a tax hell rather than a tax haven.

So what’s the bottom line? What can we say about Monaco?

Students for Liberty has a good summary.

P.S. In addition to zero income tax, Monaco also apparently has widespread gun ownership. What a great place.

P.P.S. Monaco is in 5th-place for per-capita readership of International Liberty, so the people are both prosperous and discerning!

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The Necessary and Valuable Economic Role of Tax Havens

Economists certainly don’t speak with one voice, but there’s a general consensus on two principles of public finance that will lead to a more competitive and prosperous economy.

• Lower tax rates are more conducive to work and entrepreneurship than higher tax rates.
• Reducing the tax bias against capital formation will improve growth by increasing saving and investment.

To be sure, some left-leaning economists will say that high tax rates and more double taxation are nonetheless okay because they believe there is an “equity vs. efficiency” tradeoff and they are willing to sacrifice some prosperity in hopes of achieving more equality.

I disagree, mostly because there’s compelling evidence that the left’s approach ultimately leads to less income for the poor, but this is a fair and honest debate. Both sides agree that lower rates and less double taxation will produce more growth (though they’ll disagree on how much growth) and both sides agree that a low-tax/faster-growth economy will produce more inequality (though they’ll disagree on whether the goal is to reduce inequality or reduce poverty).

Since I’m on the low-tax/faster-growth side of the debate, this is one of the reasons why I’m a big fan of tax competition and tax havens.

Simply stated, when politicians have to worry that jobs and investment can cross borders, they are less likely to impose higher tax rates and punitive levels of double taxation. Interestingly, even the statist bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (who, ironically, get tax-free salaries) agree with me, writing that tax havens “may hamper the application of progressive tax rates.” They think that’s a bad thing, of course, but we both agree that tax competition means lower rates.

And look at what has happened to tax rates in the past few years. Now that politicians have undermined tax competition and weakened tax havens, tax rates are climbing.

So I was very surprised to see some economists signed a letter saying that so-called tax havens “serve no useful economic purpose.” Here are some excerpts.

The existence of tax havens does not add to overall global wealth or well-being; they serve no useful economic purpose. …these jurisdictions…increase inequality…and undermine…countries’ ability to collect their fair share of taxes. …There is no economic justification for allowing the continuation of tax havens.

You probably won’t be surprised by some of the economists who signed the letter. Thomas Piketty was on the list, which is hardly a surprise. Along with Jeffrey Sachs, who also has a track record of favoring more statism. Another predictable signatory is Olivier Blanchard, the former top economist at the pro-tax International Monetary Fund.

The only surprise was that Angus Deaton, the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for economics, signed the letter.

But if that’s an effective “appeal to authority,” there’s a far bigger list of Nobel Prize winners who recognize the economic consensus outlined above and who understand a one-size-fits-all approach would undermine progress.

In other words, there is a very strong “economic purpose” and “economic justification” for tax havens and tax competition.

Simply stated, they curtail the greed of the political class.

Philip Booth of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London opined on this issue. Here’s some of what he wrote for City A.M.

…the statement that tax havens “have no useful purpose” is demonstrably wrong and most of the other claims in the letter are incredible. Offshore centres allow companies and investment funds to operate internationally without having to abide by several different sets of rules and, often, pay more tax than ought to be due. …Investors who use tax havens can avoid being taxed twice on their investments and can avoid being taxed at a higher rate than that which prevails in the country in which they live, but they do not avoid all tax. …tax havens also allow the honest to shelter their money from corrupt and oppressive politicians. …one of the advantages of tax havens is that they help hold governments to account. They make it possible for businesses to avoid the worst excesses of government largesse and crazy tax systems – including the 39 per cent US corporation tax rate. They have other functions too: it is simply wrong to say that they have no useful purpose. It is also wrong to argue that, if only corrupt governments had more tax revenue, their people would be better served.

Amen. I especially like his final point in that excerpt, which is similar to Marian Tupy’s explanation that tax planning and tax havens are good for Africa’s growth.

Last but not least, Philip makes a key point about whether tax havens are bad because they are sometimes utilized by bad people.

…burglars operate where there is property. However, we would not abolish property because of burglars. We should not abolish tax havens either.

When talking to reporters, politicians, and others, I make a similar point, arguing that we shouldn’t ban cars simply because they are sometimes used as getaway vehicles from bank robberies.

The bottom line, as Professor Booth notes, is that we need tax havens and tax competition if we want reasonable fiscal systems.

But this isn’t simply an issue of wanting better tax policy in order to achieve more prosperity. In part because of demographic changes, tax havens and tax competition are necessary if we want to discourage politicians from creating “goldfish government” by taxing and spending nations into economic ruin.

P.S. Here’s my video on the economic case for tax havens.

 

P.P.S. Let’s not forget that the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is the international bureaucracy most active in the fight to destroy tax competition. The is especially outrageous because American tax dollars subsidize the OECD.

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Hypocrisy Update: Leftists Want the Peasants (but not Themselves) to Endure Big Government

I wrote last month about Secretary of State John Kerry being a giant hypocrite because he’s been a critic of so-called tax havens, yet he and his family benefits immensely from investments in various low-tax jurisdictions.

But perhaps that’s something that Obama requires when selecting people for that position. It turns out that Kerry’s predecessor also utilized tax havens.

Earlier this year, the New York Post editorialized about Hillary Clinton’s attack against tax havens, which they found to be absurd since the Clinton family benefits significantly from places such as the Cayman Islands.

Hillary Clinton last week lunged into her most flagrant fit of hypocrisy yet. …she took new aim at the rich — including their use of tax dodges. She told MSNBC: “We can go after some of these schemes … the kind of…routing income through the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands or wherever.” Huh. …the Clintons’ family wealth has grown big-time thanks to firms with significant holdings in places like . . . the Caymans. As The Daily Caller notes, Bill Clinton spent years as a partner in his (now-ex-) buddy Ron Burkle’s investment fund Yucaipa Global — registered in the Cayman Islands. …It’s a family thing: Chelsea Clinton’s hubby, Marc Mezvinsky, is a partner in a hedge fund with multiple holdings incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

This isn’t to criticize Cayman, by the way. It’s one of the best jurisdictions in the world if you want high levels of honest governance and very sensible tax and regulatory policies.

But shouldn’t politicians practice what they preach? So why aren’t Kerry and Clinton instead investing in France or Greece to show their support for high tax burdens?

By the way, the editorial also cited the Clinton family’s house, which is owned by a trust to help dodge the death tax, something that I also called attention to back in 2014.

Let’s shift from taxes to the environment. Writing for Real Clear Politics, Ed Conard takes aim at the moral preening of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Time Magazine released its list of the top 100 Most Influential People and placed Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover of its magazine for the personal example he sets on climate change. How Ironic! …According to the leaked Sony documents for example, DiCaprio took six private roundtrip flights from Los Angeles to New York over a 6-week period and, a private jet to the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland. Pictures of him vacationing on big yachts… What hypocrisy! He enjoys the very luxuries that he admonishes others not to indulge.

Oh, wait, he buys carbon offsets, the modern version of purchasing an indulgence.

But Mr. Conard is not very impressed by that bit of moral preening.

So who really paid for DiCaprio’s grossly polluting ways? The rest of the world of course, not DiCaprio. …A person’s consumption is their true cost to the rest of society, not their income, nor their unspent wealth. Does the tax DiCaprio imposes on himself for polluting the world reduce his polluting consumption? Hardly! In fact, it encourages more of it. …DiCaprio, and others like him, buy carbon offsets to sooth their guilt—guilt they never needed to incur in the first place. …they sooth their guilt by voting to spend someone else’s income helping others. They think they have done a good deed when they have really done nothing at all.

I’m not sure I agree that carbon is pollution, and I also don’t like referring to consumption as a cost, but he’s right on the money about DiCaprio being a fraud or a phony (something that Michelle Fields exposed in a recent interview).

Let’s now shift back to taxes.

When I was in Montreal last year for a conference on tax competition, one of the highlights was hearing Governor Sam Brownback talk about his pro-growth tax policy. My least favorite part of the conference, by contrast, was hearing Margaret Hodge, a politician from the United Kingdom, pontificate about the evils of tax avoidance.

And the reason that was such an unpleasant experience is that she’s a glaring hypocrite. Here are some excerpts from a report published by the International Business Times.

Labour’s Margaret Hodge was, according to The Times, among the beneficiaries in 2011 of the winding-up of a Liechtenstein trust that held shares in the private steel-trading business set up by her father. The Times reports that just under 96,000 Stemcor shares handed to Hodge in 2011 came from the tiny principality, which is renowned for low tax rates. Three quarters of the shares in the family’s Liechtenstein trust had previously been held in Panama, which Ms Hodge described last month as “one of the most secretive jurisdictions” with “the least protection anywhere in the world against money laundering”.

Let’s close by identifying one more hypocritical “champagne socialist” from the United Kingdom, as reported by the U.K.-based Telegraph.

Dame Vivienne is now accused of hypocrisy over tax avoidance allegations that put her in direct conflict with one of the Green Party’s main policies. The most recent company accounts show Dame Vivienne’s main UK business is paying £2 million a year to an offshore company set up in Luxembourg for the right to use her name on her own fashion label. Tax experts have described the arrangement as “tax avoidance” that cheats the UK Treasury out of about £500,000 a year. The model is similar to one used by Starbucks, the coffee chain, which found itself at the centre of a protest over its use of Luxembourg to reduce its tax bill in the UK. …One City accountant, who studied the accounts of Vivienne Westwood Ltd, said: “This has to be tax avoidance. Why else would you make these payments to a company in Luxembourg? It makes the Green Party hypocrites for taking her money and Westwood a hypocrite for backing a party with policies she does not appear to endorse.”

So we can add Ms. Hodge and Ms. Vivienne to the list of American leftists who also utilize tax havens to minimize their tax burdens.

And all of the people above, as well as those above, will be charter members of the Statist Hall of Fame whenever I get around to setting up that page.

• The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which advocates higher tax for everyone else while providing gold-plated tax-free salaries and benefits to its own employees.
• The leftist political types who say tax havens are bad and immoral while simultaneously utilizing these low-tax jurisdictions to protect and grow their own wealth.
• The politicians and congressional staffers who decided to coerce others into Obamacare while seeking special exemptions for themselves.
• The rich leftists who advocate higher taxes for other people even though they refuse to send more of their own money to Washington.
• Prince Charles of the United Kingdom, who preaches coerced sacrifice for ordinary people even though his “carbon footprint” would be in the top 1 percent.
• The statists who fight against school choice for poor families while sending their own kids to pricey private schools for the elite.
• George Soros for supporting regulation for you and me, but not for himself.
• The Canadian politician who supports government-run healthcare for his constituents but comes to America for private treatment when he’s sick.

And there are a lot more that deserve to be mocked for their statist hypocrisy.

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John Kerry’s Tax Haven Investments and other Examples of Statist Hypocrisy

What do left-wing firebrand Congressman Alan Grayson, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, Obama’s top trade negotiator Michael Froman, liberal financier Donald Sussman, and big-money Democratic donor Tom Steyer. all have in common?

The answer is that they all engage in tax avoidance and tax planning by utilizing tax havens. Like many other Democrats (and Democrat donors), they understand it would be very foolish to deliberately pay more tax than is required.

Yet they all want the rest of us to pay higher taxes!

And now we can add Secretary of State John Kerry to our list of tax haven hypocrites.

Here’s some of what we know from, the Daily Caller‘s exposé.

Secretary of State John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz have invested millions of U.S. dollars through family trusts in at least 11 offshore tax havens, according to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group. …Two other trusts appear to have been set up by the Heinz family since Kerry was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013 to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. …that doesn’t sit well with some who would normally be supportive of Kerry. “Well I say it doesn’t look good by any means,” said Susan Harley, deputy director of Congress Watch, a progressive lobby organization founded by Ralph Nader.

Actually, since the only “tax havens” listed are the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Guernsey, and the British Virgin Islands, it appears that the story should have stated 11 trust investments in tax havens, not trust investments in 11 tax havens.

But I’m nitpicking. As you can see, the Kerry family makes wide use of structures in these low-tax jurisdictions.

Utilizing Cayman-based structures is a sensible choice for the Kerry family, by the way.

Just like it is perfectly appropriate for people to use Panama-organized structures when engaging in international business and investment.

The only reason this is even a story because John Kerry is a left-wing hypocrite who wants everyone else to pay high taxes, but he conveniently arranges his affairs so his family’s money is protected.

Heck, he even moored his yacht in Rhode Island to dodge several hundred thousand dollars of tax that otherwise would have been owed to the state of Massachusetts.

Once again, this was a perfectly reasonable choice. But it’s a bit galling that a wealthy statist like Kerry takes these steps while simultaneously supporting ever-higher tax burdens on those of us who weren’t born with silver spoons in our mouths.

And since we’re on the topic of leftist hypocrites and tax havens, it turns out that the crank who pushed for big government and high taxes when he was Greece’s Finance Minister also seems to like the “offshore” world for his own money.

Here are some blurbs from a story in the U.K.-based Times.

He describes himself as a Marxist libertarian but a lifestyle of glamorous photo-shoots, evenings in chic bars and weekends in luxurious island villas may have convinced the man who brought Greece to the verge of bankruptcy to become a highly-paid capitalist. Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, is allegedly charging almost £40,000 for speeches he is invited to make worldwide, seeking payment via an HSBC bank account in Oman, according to reports.

Just like with Kerry, there’s nothing wrong or illegal in Varoufakis’ actions. Giving speeches for money and keeping money in another jurisdiction are perfectly legitimate behaviors.

Heck, given the Greek government’s rampant corruption and wasteful habits, I think it’s defensible for people to go one step farther and evade as well as avoid.

But not for Varoufakis. When an advocate of class warfare decides he doesn’t want to live under the rules he would like to impose on the rest of us, he’s simply being a hypocrite and is undeserving of any sympathy.

Not to mention that anyone who think that you can be a Marxist and a libertarian at the same time obviously is a blithering nincompoop.

Let’s shift to another issue for our final glaring example of left-wing hypocrisy. Writing for USA Today, Professor Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee is irked by statists with very big carbon footprints who attend ritzy conferences to concoct plans to impose hardship on the rest of us.

…opulent conferences seem to be our political class’s response to pretty much everything, but they do ring hollow when the topic is what sort of sacrifices should be imposed on the rest of us. …Perhaps people aren’t inclined to treat climate change as a crisis because, despite all the talk, the political class itself isn’t acting as if it’s a crisis. Shouldn’t “shared sacrifice” start at the top?

Glenn has a few modest ideas to resolve this problem of inequity.

First, no more jetting around. Congress should provide that no federal money — either at agencies or at institutions receiving federal funds — should pay for travel to attend conferences or meetings. …Second, to set an example, no air conditioning in federal offices. Sure, it’s uncomfortable without it, but we won World War II with mostly un-air conditioned offices, so we can manage without A/C today. …Third, no more fundraising jaunts on Air Force One. Typically, presidents schedule a fundraiser, then find an elementary school or something to tour in the same town to make the trip “official business.” Congress should provide that no fundraising appearances can be made on any presidential trip charged to the taxpayers. …Fourth, no more UN conferences except online.

Those are all good ideas, but we also need some rules to help other hypocrites (like Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince Charles) practice what they preach.

P.S. In addition to being hypocrites, many leftists also have bad judgement about tyrannical regimes. I wrote last year about Paul Samuelson’s misguided endorsement of the Soviet economic system just as it was about to collapse.

Well, another well-know left-wing economist actually wrote an article to praise the “Korean Miracle.” But Joan Robinson was writing about North Korea rather than South Korea!

It’s true that she didn’t have this evidence available when she was gushing about the Pyongyang being a “city without slums,” but it’s still remarkable that she went out of her way to praise a totalitarian dictatorship.

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Tax Havens Promote Economic Prosperity and Protect Human Liberty

I sometimes wonder if I was put on this planet to defend tax competition and tax havens.

I argue for fiscal sovereignty, good tax policy, and financial privacy to the denizens of Capitol Hill, both in writing and in person.

I make the same arguments for readers of the New York Times, as well as readers of big-box store magazines.

My affection for low-tax jurisdictions is so strong that I ran the risk of getting thrown in a Mexican jail and also was accused of disloyalty to America by a bureaucrat for the Treasury Department.

Though I much prefer the hardship duty of arguing for tax competition and tax havens in places such as Bermuda, Antigua, Monaco, the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, and the Cayman Islands. Yes, I’m willing to go the extra mile in the fight for economic liberty.

And, if nothing else, my intensity on these issues makes me quotable, at least to writers for the Economist.

Not one to mince words, Daniel Mitchell of the right-wing Cato Institute denounces the OECD’s push to co-ordinate global tax enforcement as “the devil’s spawn” and possibly even a step towards the fiscal equivalent of…the World Trade Organisation. Tax havens “should not have to enforce the burdensome tax laws of other countries”, he thunders. “Having grown rich with the tax policies of their choosing, the OECD countries are pulling up the ladder and saying, ‘you can’t do the same to attract investment’. It’s fiscal imperialism.”

But I’m not the only one with sensible views on these issues.

A different article in the Economist highlights some benefits made possible by “tax havens.”

Offshore centres oil the financial interface between larger economies, insists Alasdair Robertson of Maples. Grant Stein of Walkers, another Cayman firm, thinks of it as “the plumbing that connects the global financial system”. …They enjoy support from some fierce ideological warriors, including libertarians at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. …many offshore transactions are about tax neutrality, not cheating. …“It’s not about evasion but about avoiding an extra, gratuitous layer of tax,” says John Collis of Conyers Dill & Pearman, a Bermuda law firm. Such structures offer legal neutrality too. In a joint venture in, say, the BVI, no shareholder has a home advantage; all get a sophisticated, predictable common-law system with a small but well-regarded local commercial court and Britain’s Privy Council as the ultimate arbiter. …Some offshore champions consider tax competition a good thing because it discourages countries from trying to tax their way out of trouble.

Writing for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, David Dodwell explains the valuable role of low-tax jurisdictions.

…offshore centres like Panama, the British Virgin Islands, Singapore, Hong Kong, Jersey, Lichtenstein or Switzerland serve a multitude of valuable roles. …Offshore financial centres have always acted as safe havens against such chaos or personal insecurity, and should be allowed to continue to do so. Is Hong Kong to be stigmatised as a tax haven because it offers a company low and simple tax arrangements compared with France, or Italy or India or wherever?

He uses his own experiences as an example.

When I settled permanently in Hong Kong, I did so not just because the work was interesting… I did so because I escaped onerous British taxes, and horrendous, stressful weeks completing nonsensically complex tax returns for Britain’s Inland Revenue. When I uplifted my Financial Times pension from Britain and placed it in a Hong Kong trust, I did so perfectly legally and transparently because if I had the pension sent to me monthly from Britain, it would be taxed. This was a pension built on a lifetime of hard-earned labour that had already been taxed once. I saw no justification for Britain’s inland revenue to tax me a second time. Was I acting unethically by eliminating a tax obligation to the British Government? …Building savings, and providing long-term security to my family…is not something I think I should feel embarrassed about. Nor should governments that create complex and burdensome personal and corporate tax regimes be surprised if people relocate to other jurisdictions where operating overheads are less onerous, and tax rules more simple and comprehensible.

He concludes with some wise words on the value of low-tax jurisdictions for the rest of the world.

As trade has exploded over the past four decades, so companies have become progressively more international, with operations sprawling across many economy and tax jurisdictions. Choosing a single low-tax base from which to coordinate such potentially messy production networks makes eminent good sense. So too is a zero-tax offshore location valuable as a way of avoiding double taxation for companies operating in more than one economy. …Use of such centres makes incorporation simpler, gives access to tried and tested legal systems including for arbitration, and tax-neutral treatment of investment. All legitimate reasons.

In a piece for the Financial Times that focuses primarily on British offshore financial centers, Richard Hay explains why so-called tax havens are so valuable.

Many of those who benefit from offshore centres — including millions receiving workplace pensions — are not aware of the key role they play in their financial affairs. Such financial centres facilitate trade, investment and economic growth. Globalisation has contributed to a doubling of world gross domestic product over the past two decades. Much of the benefit has accrued to developing countries, where dramatic declines in poverty have resulted from connecting local workforces to world consumers. …The true appeal of the UK offshore centres lies in their widely trusted British-inspired laws, courts, and professionals. The predictability and security offered by British institutions make such jurisdictions magnets for investors seeking reliable structures for international investment.

He cites one example of how Jersey (one of the Channel Islands, not the over-taxed New Jersey in the United States) produces big benefits for the United Kingdom.

UK offshore centres support British jobs, increase financing available for investment in the country and elevate the rate of return for savings. A 2013 study conducted by Capital Economics, a research consultancy, found that Jersey supports more than 140,000 British jobs — six times as many as the entire UK steel industry. The study found that Jersey’s contribution generates £2.5bn a year in tax for the exchequer, as much as the UK loses through all tax avoidance, onshore and offshore, combined.

And workers are big beneficiaries.

International investment is pooled in funds in tax-neutral countries like the Cayman Islands. Cost-efficient facilities afforded by such centres boost saving and pension returns, improving the lives of ordinary workers in retirement and easing the welfare burden on cash-strapped governments. Such pooled funds are liable to tax in the countries where their income and gains are earned, and again when received by the ultimate investors.

In a column for City A.M., James Quarmby highlights some of the practical and appropriate business reasons for utilizing so-called tax havens.

…the truth is that the major OFCs are extremely well regulated and have been so for many years. It is far harder to set up a company in Jersey than in the UK, for instance, because of its rigorous “know your client” rules. …most people use companies in OFCs for quite mundane, non-tax reasons. If you are trading or investing internationally, an offshore company is an essential building block for your business. …Experienced business people will tell you that there are certain emerging markets where, under no circumstances, would you want to resolve an investors’ dispute – you would much rather resolve it in a Cayman court where you could be sure of a fair fight. …Another reason for using an OFC is the bi-lateral treaties many of them have entered into with other countries. Mauritius, for instance, has excellent treaties with India and as a consequence it is now the world’s most important financial gateway to the sub-continent. Hong Kong, for similar reasons, is the gateway into China… OFCs are a vital part of our globalised world – without them international trade and investment would seriously suffer, global GDP would be lower, and the world would be a poorer place.

By the way, there is an effective and pro-growth way to boost tax compliance, as explained in another article in the Economist.

Getting rich people to pay their dues is an admirable ambition, but this attack is both hypocritical and misguided. It may be good populist politics, but leaders who want to make their countries work better should focus instead on cleaning up their own back yards and reforming their tax systems. …governments should not bash companies for trying to reduce their tax bills, if they do so legally. In the end, tax systems must be reformed. …Governments also need to lower corporate tax rates. Tapping companies is inefficient: firms pass the burden on to others. …Nor do corporate taxes raise much money: barely more than 2% of GDP (8.5% of tax revenue) in America and 2.7% in Britain. …a lower rate on a broader base…would be more efficient and would probably raise more revenue.

Pierre Bessard of Switzerland’s Liberales Institut looks at the big picture in his monograph on Individual Rights and the Fight Against Tax Evasion. He starts by noting that the entire anti-tax competition campaign is an illegitimate exercise of “might makes right.”

…the G20 as a body lacks democratic or legal legitimacy and is in effect a cartel of governments… The G20…is clearly a departure from the rule of law in international affairs and replaces negotiations with political pressure under the (explicit or implicit) threat of economic and financial sanctions.

He then explains that anti-tax competition advocates rely on laughable arguments about the supposed desirability of bigger government.

To make the G20 governments’ war against citizens protecting wealth and resources in “tax havens” more palatable, the OECD  has initially argued that governments “need every tax dollar legally due to combat the world recession”. As this argument lost its credibility as the evidence  increasingly showed that Keynesian-style fiscal interventionism worsened and prolonged the crisis, the OECD now holds that tax avoidance and tax evasion mean fewer resources “for infrastructure and services such as education and health, lowering standards of living in both developed and developing economies”. This statement, however, contradicts all theoretical and empirical evidence, which shows that a smaller scope and size of government go hand in hand with higher  economic growth and living standards.

And he also explains why tax competition leads to better tax policy and more growth.

By restricting government’s capacity to indefinitely raise the tax burden, the diversity of jurisdictions and systems unquestionably contributes to greater prosperity. The most obvious consequence of tax competition is its beneficial impact on saving, since lower taxes encourage capital accumulation. This in turn leads to more investment, more jobs and more economic welfare. …Experience shows that “tax havens”…play at most a preventive or corrective role of arbitrage in the face of excessive taxation. In general, tax competition from “tax havens” leads to a better balance between public services and the tax burden. …From an economic perspective, the use of “tax havens” facilitates capital accumulation and improves economic prosperity in the high-tax countries where the capital is eventually repatriated to be invested in factors of production. “Tax havens” therefore increase the efficiency of international  capital markets and thus the efficiency of capital allocation to the most productive investments, thereby contributing to raise overall living standards. As a result, “tax havens” benefit all residents, whether they make use of them directly or not. They serve to channel capital and avoid double or even triple taxation in high-tax countries and lead to better economic performance in those countries.

The bottom line is that tax competition protects individuals by at least partially constraining the greed of the political class.

…tax diversity is an essential condition for the preservation of individual liberty. Competition tends to restrict the predatory potential of the territorial monopoly on the use of coercion (which defines government). …An individual’s freedom of choice and legitimate rights to the fruits of his or her labor and property are thus better protected in a world with strong tax competition.

And Pierre closes by noting the powerful intellectual lineage in favor of systems diversity as a driver and protector of liberty.

…jurisdictional competition and the advantages of smaller, open territorial monopolies controlled by governments are important ideas of the intellectual liberal tradition. Such diverse thinkers as David Hume, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Turgot insisted on the role of institutional diversity and the right to exit for individual freedom.

P.S. Pierre also wrote a superb column a few years ago about tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy for the New York Times.

P.P.S. Here’s my video on the economic case for tax havens.

P.P.P.S. Let’s not forget that the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is the international bureaucracy most active in the fight to destroy tax competition. The is doubly outrageous because, 1) our tax dollars subsidize the OECD, and 2) those bureaucrats get tax-free salaries!

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Operation Choke Point, Bank De-Risking, and Obama Administration Coercion

For all his faults, you have to give President Obama credit for strong convictions. He’s generally misguided, but it’s perversely impressive to observe his relentless advocacy for higher taxes, bigger government, more intervention, and limits on constitutional freedoms.

That being said, his desire to “fundamentally transform” the United States leads him to decisions that run roughshod over core principles of a civilized society such as the rule of law.

Consider, for instance, the Obama Administration project, known as “Operation Choke Point,” to restrict banking services to politically incorrect businesses such as gun dealers.

It doesn’t matter than these companies are engaged in legal activities. In pursuit of its ideological agenda, the White House is using regulatory bullying in hopes of getting banks to deny services to these businesses.

For more information, click here to read about recent efforts to end this thuggish initiative. Also, here’s a very short video explaining the topic.

Well, there’s an international version of Operation Choke Point.It’s called “de-risking,” and it occurs when banks are pressured by regulators into cutting off banking services to certain regions.

The Wall Street Journal has a column on this topic by two adjunct professors from Fordham Law School.

…a widespread trend in banking called “de-risking.” Reacting to pressure by various government regulators…, banks are rejecting customers in risky regions and industries. Throughout 2014 J.P. Morgan Chase dropped more than 100,000 accounts because they were considered risky… Between 2013 and 2014, Standard Chartered closed 70,000 small and medium-size business accounts, and ended hundreds of relationships with banks in Latin America and Central Europe. …In yet another form of de-risking, the European Central Bank reports that banks have steadily cut their correspondent relationships—that is, the other banks they work with in sending money around the globe. HSBC alone closed more than 326 correspondent bank accounts between 2010 and 2012. …the banks’ actions are understandable. They face unprecedented regulatory penalties, unclear legal standards, high litigation costs and systemic risks to their business. In 2012 HSBC settled with the Justice Department, paying $1.9 billion in fines for such failings as “ignor[ing] the money laundering risks associated with doing business with certain Mexican customers.” …A bank with a single mistaken customer relationship could be put out of business. Banks have concluded that they will be punished anytime money reaches criminals, regardless of their own efforts. It’s better to drop all supposedly risky customers.

The authors explain that there should be “safe harbor” rules to protect both banks and their customers. That’s a very sensible suggestion.

And there are easy options to make this happen. I’m not a big fan of the Financial Action Task Force, which is an OECD-connected organization that ostensibly sets money-laundering rules for the world. Simply stated, the bureaucrats at FATF think there should be no human right to privacy. Moreover, FATF advocates harsh regulatory burdens that impose very high costs while producing miserly benefits.

That being said, if a nation is not on the FATF blacklist, that should be more than enough evidence that it imposes very onerous rules to guard against misbehavior.

Unfortunately, bureaucrats in the United States and Europe don’t actually seem interested in fighting money laundering. Or, to be more precise, it appears that their primary interest is to penalize places with low tax rates.

Many Caribbean jurisdictions, for instance, are being victimized by de-risking even though they comply with all the FATF rules. And this means they lose important correspondent relationships with larger banks.

To address this issue, the Organization of American States recently held a meeting to consider this topic. I was invited to address the delegations. And since other speakers dealt with the specific details of de-risking (you can watch the entire event by clicking here), I discussed the big-picture issue of how low-tax jurisdictions are being persecuted by harsh (and ever-changing) demands. Here are my remarks, with a few of my PowerPoint slides embedded in the video.

Now for the most remarkable (and disturbing) development from that meeting.

Many of the Caribbean nations offered a rather innocuous resolution in hopes of getting agreement that de-risking is a problem and that it would be a good idea if nations came up with clear rules to eliminate the problem.

That seems like a slam dunk, right?

Not exactly. The U.S. delegation actually scuttled the declaration by proposing alternative language that was based on the notion that other countries should put the blame on themselves – even though these nations already are complying with all the FATF rules! You can read the original declaration and proposed changes by the U.S. by clicking here, but this is the excerpt that really matters.

Wow, what arrogance and hypocrisy by the Obama appointees. These jurisdictions, most with black majorities, are suffering from ad hoc and discriminatory de-risking because the Administration doesn’t like the fact that they generally have low taxes.

But rather than openly state that they favor discrimination against low-tax nations, the political hacks put in place by the Obama White House proposed blame-the-victim language, thus ensuring that nothing would happen.

P.S. Perhaps the most surreal part of the experience is the strange bond I felt with the Venezuelan delegation. Regular readers know I’m not a fan of the statist and oppressive government in Caracas. But the Venezuelan delegation apparently takes great pleasure in opposing the position of the U.S. government, so we were sort of on the same side in the discussion. A very bizarre enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend situation.

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Another Attack on Tax Competition: “Panama Papers” Is a Non-Controversy Controversy

Three years ago, thieves stole a bunch of information from “offshore” service providers in the Cook Islands and British Virgin Islands. This was supposed to be a ground-breaking exposé with huge ramifications, but it turned out to be a tempest in a teapot. As I pointed out at the time, all that we really learned is that people who use offshore services are generally honest and law-abiding. And they definitely had far more integrity than the politicians who routinely attack the offshore world.

Well, here we go again. We’ve learned that thieves have now obtained client data from a global law firm based in Panama, and leftists once again are making this seem like a giant story.

But here’s what you really need to know. This is simply another chapter in the never-ending war by high-tax governments against tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy.

Here’s some of what I wrote for Caribbean News on the issue, starting with the big picture.

Many nations in Western Europe can no longer afford their big welfare states. Countries such as Greece, Spain, and Italy already have needed bailouts, while it’s just a matter of time before several other European nations face a fiscal day of reckoning. …rather than fix their own fiscal problems, many of these nations are working through international bureaucracies such as the G-20 and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to rewrite the rules and traditions of global commerce in an attempt to extract more tax revenue. This is why there’s been a major attack against so-called tax havens as part of a coordinated campaign to undermine fiscal sovereignty and restrict the human right of financial privacy.

In other words, welfare states are going bankrupt and they hope to somehow prop up their unaffordable entitlements with a money grab.

And they’re more than happy to rely on stolen data.

One of the more bizarre chapters in this story is the way the pro-welfare state crowd is now trying to demonize financial service providers such as law firms that are hired to fill out paperwork by investors and entrepreneurs who are setting up trusts, companies, and other entities. Consider, for instance, the plight of Mossack Fonseca, a professional services firm based in Panama. …this collection of legal practitioners and egghead trust advisors is suddenly being portrayed as an international crime syndicate that’s corrupting Western civilization one business incorporation at a time.

But it makes no sense to attack service providers.

The controversy, in large part, derives from a basic and arguably willful misunderstanding of what firms like Mossack Fonseca do – and don’t do – for their clients. In basic terms, these firms help people create new businesses and trusts. …unlike banks, these law firms don’t take possession of their clients’ money. So the notion that they are involved in “money laundering” is laughable. Once incorporation papers are filed, the law firms don’t direct in any way the operation of the businesses.

Besides, the real target isn’t the Panamanian law firm. Activists on the left, working in concert with international bureaucracies and uncompetitive governments, want to create a global tax cartel (sort of an “OPEC for politicians“) in hopes of enabling higher tax burdens.

Firms like Mossack Fonseca are merely just the latest stand-ins and proxies for a much wider campaign being waged by left-wing governments and their various allies and interest groups. This campaign is built around aggressive attacks on anyone who, for any reason, seeks to legally protect their hard-earned assets from confiscatory tax policies. …a cabal of governments…has decided not to compete…instead simply seeking to malign and destroy any entity, individual or jurisdiction that exists that deprives them of tax revenue to which politicians greedily believe they are entitled. As usual, the media outlets running these perennial “exposés,” usually at the bidding of OECD bureaucrats (who ironically get tax-free salaries).

Let’s close with a couple of points about the broader issue.

• It is hardly a surprise that wealthy people with cross-border investments use instruments (such as foundations, trusts, and companies) designed for such purposes.
• Like everyone, wealthy people value privacy (even more so because they have to worry more about kidnapping and other crimes), so these structures are designed to protect their confidentiality.
• Some of these clients may not have complied with the tax laws of their countries. That is generally a function of excessive tax rates and home-country corruption.
• A few end-user clients may be unsavory (Putin’s cronies, for instance), but should businesses be prohibited from dealing with people who are viewed as sketchy (but otherwise are not under investigation and haven’t been convicted of crimes)?
• Cross-border economic activity and structures play a valuable role in the global economy and should not be demonized, just as GM shouldn’t be demonized if some crooks use a Chevy as their getaway vehicle.
• Low-tax jurisdictions have stronger laws against dirty money than high-tax nations.

So at the risk of stating the obvious, I’m on the side of low-tax jurisdictions and the service providers in those jurisdictions. And I’ll defend them (here, here, here, here, and here) even if it means a bunch of international bureaucrats threaten to toss me in a Mexican jail or a Treasury Department official says I’m being disloyal to America.

Or, in this case, if it simply means I’m explaining why it’s a non-story that internationally active investors use international structures.

P.S. Why is it okay for rich leftists to utilize “tax havens” but not okay for people in the economy’s productive sector?

P.P.S. We should be very thankful that Senator Rand Paul is standing tall in the fight against nosy and destructive governments on this issue.

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Deconstructing the European Union’s Convoluted New Attack on “Tax Havens”

Europe is suffering from economic stagnation caused in part by excessive fiscal burdens.

So what are European policy makers doing to address this problem?

If you think the answer might have something to do with a shift to responsible fiscal policy, you obviously have no familiarity with Europe’s political elite. But if you have paid attention to their behavior, you won’t be surprised to learn that they’re lashing out at jurisdictions with better policy.

Here are a few blurbs from a story in the Economic Times.

The European Union published its first list of international tax havens on Wednesday… “We are today publishing the top 30 non-cooperative jurisdictions consisting of those countries or territories that feature on at least 10 member states’ blacklists,” EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici told a news conference. 

This is a misguided exercise for several reasons, but here are the ones that merit some discussion.

1. I can’t resist starting with a philosophical point. Low-tax jurisdictions and so-called tax havens should be emulated rather than persecuted. Their modest fiscal burdens are strongly correlated with high levels of prosperity. It’s high-tax nations that should be blacklisted and shamed for their destructive policies.

2. This new EU blacklist is particularly nonsensical because there’s no rational (even from a leftist perspective) methodology. Jurisdictions get added to the blacklist if 10 or more EU nations don’t like their tax laws. Some nations, as cited in official EU documents, even use “the level of taxation for blacklisting purposes.”

3. As has always been the case with anti-tax competition campaigns, the entire exercise reeks of hypocrisy. Big European nations such as Luxembourg and Switzerland were left off the blacklist, and the United States also was omitted (though the EU figured it was okay to pick on the U.S. Virgin Islands for inexplicable reasons).

By the way, I’m not the only person to notice the hypocrisy. Here are some excerpts from a report in the U.K.-based Guardian.

A blacklist of the world’s 30 worst-offending tax havens, published on Wednesday by the European commission, includes the tiny Polynesian island of Niue, where 1,400 people live in semi-subsistence — but does not include Luxembourg, the EU’s wealthy tax avoidance hub. …the new register does not include countries such as the Netherlands, Ireland.

And Radio New Zealand made a similar point it its report.

Anthony van Fossen, an adjunct research fellow at Australia’s Griffith University, says the list seems to be picking on smaller, easy-to-target tax havens and ignoring major ones like Singapore, Switzerland and Luxembourg. “The list is very strange in that some major havens are ignored, particularly the havens in the European Union itself, and many minor havens, including some in the Pacific Islands are highlighted.”

The more one investigates this new EU project, the more irrational it appears.

Some of the larger and more sensible European nations, including Sweden, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, didn’t even participate. Or, if they did, they decided that every jurisdiction in the world has “tax good governance.”

But other nations put together incomprehensible lists, featuring some well-known low-tax jurisdictions, but also places that have never before been considered “tax havens.” Is Botswana really a hiding spot for French taxpayers? Do Finnish taxpayers actually protect their money in Tajikistan? Is Bolivia actually a haven for the Portuguese? Do the Belgians put their funds in St. Barthelemy, which is part of France? And do Greeks put their money in Bosnia?!?

As you can see from this map, the Greeks also listed nations such as Saudi Arabia and Paraguay. No wonder the nation is such a mess. It’s governed by brain-dead government officials.

I’ve saved the best evidence for the end. If you really want to grasp the level of irrationality in the EU blacklist, it’s even been criticized by the tax-loving (but not tax-paying) bureaucrats at the OECD. Here are some details from a report out of Cayman.

‘As the OECD and the Global Forum we would like to confirm that the only agreeable assessment of countries as regards their cooperation is made by the Global Forum and that a number of countries identified in the EU exercise are either fully or largely compliant and have committed to AEOI, sometimes even as early adopters’, the email states. …‘We have already expressed our concerns (to the EU Commission) and stand ready to further clarify to the media the position of the affected jurisdictions with regard to their compliance with the Global Forum standards’, Mr Saint-Amans and Ms Bhatia wrote.

Needless to say, being compliant with the OECD is nothing to celebrate. It means a jurisdiction has been bullied into surrendering its fiscal sovereignty and agreeing to serve as a deputy tax collector for high-tax governments.

But having taken that unfortunate step, it makes no sense for these low-tax jurisdictions to now be persecuted by the EU.

P.S. Let’s add to our collection of libertarian humor (see here and here for prior examples).

This image targets the Libertarian Party, but I’ve certainly dealt many times with folks that assert that all libertarians should “grow up” and accept big government.

For what it’s worth, if growing up means acquiescing to disgusting government overreach, I prefer to remain a child.

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Another Leftist Joins the Hypocrite Hall of Fame

While the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame and Moocher Hall of Fame already exist, the Hypocrite Hall of Fame is just a concept.

But once it gets set up, Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida will definitely be a charter member.

Here are some passages from a column in the Tampa Bay Times.

U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, the outspoken, populist Democrat who thunders against Wall Street fat cats,and used to to joke about Mitt Romney’s low tax bill, incorporated a couple hedge funds in the Cayman Islands so investors could avoid taxes. Grayson Fund Ltd. and Grayson Master Fund were incorporated in 2011 in the Cayman Islands… That was the same year he wrote in the Huffington Post that the IRS should audit every Fortune 500 company because so many appear to be “evading taxes through transfer pricing and offshore tax havens.”

But apparently Grayson only wants other people to cough up more money to Washington.

Grayson’s financial disclosure statements indicate he has between $5-million and $25-million invested in the Grayson fund, and he lists no income from it.

The above sentence frankly doesn’t make sense. How can Grayson have millions of dollars of personal wealth and not generate any income?

The only plausible answer is that he’s just as bad at managing his own money as he is at managing the money of taxpayers (he “earned” an F from the National Taxpayers Union).

In any event, Grayson has plenty of company from fellow leftists who also use tax havens.

Including Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew.

And the President’s top trade negotiator.

Along with big donors to Obama.

Joined by huge donors to Democrats.

Politicians from Massachusetts also are hypocrites. They endorse higher taxes on everyone else, but use neighboring states to protect themselves from oppressive taxation. John Kerry is a prime example, as are run-of-the-mill hacks from the state legislature.

The on-air “talent” at MSNBC also has trouble obeying tax laws. At least Bill and Hillary Clinton have figured out how to legally dodge taxes while endorsing higher burdens for the rest of us.

Though I must admit that the really smart pro-tax statists simply choose to work at places where they’re exempt from taxation. Hey, nice “work” if you can get it.

P.S. Nothing written here should be construed as criticism of tax havens, which are very admirable places.

• They generally have better fiscal policy, often with zero income taxes.
• They encourage other nations to adopt better fiscal policy because of tax competition.
• They provide refuge to people suffering fiscal oppression.
• They provide privacy protection to people suffering political persecution.
• They benefit the American economy, both directly and indirectly.

I’m just irked when I discover that greedy pro-tax politicians are protecting their own money while pillaging our money.

P.P.S. By the way, it’s worth noting that the Cayman Islands is basically a conduit for investment in America’s economy.

Here’s a chart, prepared by the Treasury Department, showing that “Caribbean Banking Centers” are the biggest source of investment for America’s financial markets.

And the reason why the Cayman Islands are a platform for investment to the United States is that America is a tax haven for foreigners, assuming they follow certain rules.

P.P.P.S. Since today’s topic deals with international taxation, here’s an update on “FATCA,” which arguably is the worst provision in the entire tax code.

Here are some passages from a recent column in the New York Times.

…recent efforts by the United States Congress to capture tax revenues on unreported revenues and assets held in foreign accounts are having disastrous effects on a growing number of Americans living abroad. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, signed into law in March 2010 but only now coming into full effect, has been a bipartisan lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Pressure is growing to halt its pernicious impact.

I agree the law is a disaster and that pressure is growing to ameliorate its negative effects, but we need more lawmakers like Rand Paul if we want to translate unhappiness into action.

Here are further details from the column.

The bureaucratic burden of identifying, verifying and reporting has caused many banks to regard American clients, particularly those of moderate means, as more trouble than they are worth. Middle-class Americans living abroad are losing bank accounts and home mortgages and, in some cases, having their retirement savings exposed to debilitating taxes and penalties. …Those impacted are left with the choice of uprooting their families (including foreign spouses and children), careers and businesses to re-establish a life in the United States; or to make the painful decision to renounce their citizenship.

No wonder so many Americans are put in a position where they have to give up their passports and become foreigners.

But here’s the really frightening part.

Worse yet, the law has spawned a potentially more intrusive program known as the Global Account Tax Compliance Act, or Gatca. The proposal, developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, calls for data from accounts opened by a foreign national to be automatically reported to that person’s homeland tax authorities. While Gatca is in an early stage of negotiation and implementation, observers believe that as many as 65 countries will ultimately be involved. Fatca, and by extension Gatca, are forming more links in the chain of global government snooping into the lives of innocent individuals under the guise of identifying criminals and tax cheats. For Americans, it is a massive breach of the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure. The repeal of Fatca is the only way to end this dangerous and growing government overreach.

I’ve been warning about this awful outcome for almost four years, so it’s good to see more people are recognizing the danger.

And if you want more details, Richard Rahn and David Burton have explained why these awful policies will lead to bigger government and more statism.

P.P.P.P.S. I’m sure nobody will be surprised to learns that Obama has played a destructive role in these debates.

After all, tax havens and tax competition inhibit government growth and Obama wants the opposite outcome.

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Bringing Growth to the Developing World: The Role of Tax Havens and the Size of Government

If nothing else, our leftist friends deserve credit for chutzpah.

All around the world, we see concrete evidence that big government leads to stagnation and decay, yet statists repeatedly argue that further expansions in taxes and spending will be good for growth.

During Obama’s recent state-of-the-union address, he pushed for class warfare policies to finance bigger government, claiming such policies would be an “investment” in the future.

But it’s not just Obama. Hillary Clinton, on several occasions (see here, here, here, and here), has explicitly argued that higher tax rates and bigger government are good for growth.

The statists at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (financed with our tax dollars) actually argue that higher taxes and more spending will somehow enable more prosperity, both in the developing world and in the industrialized world.

And some left-wing “charities” are getting in on this scam. Oxfam, for instance, now argues that higher tax rates and bigger government are necessary for growth and development in poor nations. And Christian Aid makes the same dodgy argument.

The Oxfam/Christian Aid argument is especially perverse.

If they actually think that bloated public sectors are the key to faster growth in the developing world, shouldn’t they provide at least one example of a jurisdiction that has become rich following that approach?

Let’s examine this issue more closely.

Here are some excerpts from a column in the most recent issue of Cayman Financial Review. Written by the Cato Institute’s Marian Tupy, it looks at the challenge of boosting prosperity in sub-Saharan Africa.

Marian starts with some good news. The 21st Century, at least so far, has seen genuine progress.

Real gross domestic product has been ticking along at an average annual rate of 4.8 percent, while per capita income has grown by roughly 40 percent. …The benefits to ordinary people have been impressive. The share of Africans living on less than $1.25 per day fell from 56 percent in 1990 to 48 percent in 2010. …If the current trend continues, Africa’s poverty rate will fall to 24 percent by 2030. In addition, per-capita caloric intake has increased from 2,150 kcal in 1990 to 2,430 kcal in 2013. …Moreover, between 1990 and 2012, the percentage of the population with access to clean drinking water increased from 48 percent to 64 percent. Many African countries have also seen dramatic falls in infant and child mortality. Over the last decade, for example, child mortality in Senegal, Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana, and Kenya declined at a rate exceeding 6 percent per year.

This is very good news.

And foreign investment deserves some of the credit. When western multinationals enter a nation, they play a vital role in creating (relatively) high-paying and building a nation’s capital stock.

Particularly since the overall economic and policy climate in many sub-Saharan nations is very dismal.

As you can see from the accompanying map, based on the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World, most nations in the region are either in the most economically repressed category (red) or the next-t0-last category (yellow).

In either case, these countries obviously have far too much taxes, spending, regulation, and intervention.

Needless to say, these policies make it difficult for local businesses and entrepreneurs to succeed, which means the jobs and prosperity made possible by foreign investment are absolutely vital.

But Marian warns that this progress could come to a halt if African nations fall victim to class-warfare proposals that seek to demonize multinational firms as part of a push to expand tax collections.

…future growth could be at risk if economic conditions on the continent deteriorate.  And that may happen if policy makers decide to adopt a more hostile approach to entrepreneurs and investors. Specifically, African governments are urged to take a stance against so-called tax havens, which are alleged to deprive the former of significant chunks of tax revenue. …Oxfam, a British charity, has argued that…tax maneuvering by multinational companies is entrenching poverty and weakening developing countries’ economies. According to Oxfam, “Developing countries lose an estimated $100 billion to $160 billion annually to corporate tax dodging.” As such, Oxfam has urged the G20 to rewrite international tax laws so that “developing countries are not taken advantage of by the rich.”

The problem with this ideology, as Marian explains, is that foreign companies won’t have nearly as much incentive to create jobs and growth in Africa if tax policy becomes more onerous.

Africa has one of the world’s riskiest business environments. Government accountability and transparency are low. The rule of law and protection of property rights are weak. Corruption is high. In a sense, low taxes compensate domestic and foreign investors for shortcomings of the business environment that are more difficult to address: a low tax rate can be legislated overnight, but corruption-free bureaucracy takes generations to accomplish. What’s true for corporations is also true for individuals. Many wealthy Africans continue to work and create wealth in the difficult African business environment in part because they know that at least a portion of their wealth is safe from inflation and predation.

But the most important part of Marian’s article is the section where he debunks the notion that bigger government somehow leads to more prosperity.

…the argument in favor of higher tax revenues assumes that government spending is an efficient driver of economic growth. This is a common misperception in the West, which is now being applied, with potentially disastrous consequences, to the developing world. In America, for example, Hillary Clinton has argued that more revenue improves economic development and the “rich people … [who] do not contribute [jeopardize]… the growth of their own countries.” She has urged “the wealthy across the Americas to pay their ‘fair share’ of taxes in order to eliminate poverty and promote economic opportunity for all.” Is the former Secretary of State correct? Are developing nations suffering from inadequate levels of public spending? Is there a need for more revenue to finance bigger government so that national economies can grow faster?

Marian looks at the actual data.

And he makes the absolutely essential point that western nations became rich when government was very small and there was virtually no redistribution.

According to the International Monetary Fund, government outlays consume, on average, about 27 percent of economic output in sub-Saharan nations….the burden of government spending averaged only about 10 percent of economic output in North America and Western Europe through the late 1800s and early 1900s – the period when the nations in these regions enjoyed huge increases in living standards and evolved from agricultural poverty to middle-class prosperity. If the goal is to have African nations copy the successful growth spurts of western nations (keeping in mind that per-capita economic output today in sub-Saharan Africa is roughly equal to per-capita GDP levels in Western nations in the late 1800s), then the latter’s experience implies that high levels of government spending are not necessary. Indeed, too much spending presumably hinders growth by leading to the misallocation of labor and capital. Moreover, it should be pointed out that the United States and other currently rich countries also had no income taxes when they made their big improvements in economic status.

In other words, the best recipe for African prosperity is the one that worked for the western world.

Sub-Saharan Africa needs small government and free markets.

And, yes, there is a role for government in providing the rule of law and other core public goods, but African nations already collect more than enough revenue to finance these legitimate roles.

Here’s the bottom line.

Of course, not all government spending is bad for growth. Upholding the rule of law and protecting property rights costs money, but helps growth. Historically, African governments have been at their weakest when providing for these “night watchman” functions of the state. And their economies suffered as a result. Were African governments to focus on a set of narrow, clearly defined goals, they would find plenty of revenue to finance their accomplishment – without having to resort to punitive tax policies that are likely to undermine Africa’s long term economic prospects.

P.S. Since today’s topic dealt with tax havens, that’s my excuse to share this interview with the folks at the Mises Institute. I wax poetic about why tax havens are a liberalizing force in the global economy, while also touching on issues such as double taxation, corporate inversions, financial privacy, and FATCA.

For more information, here’s my video series on tax competition and tax havens.

P.P.S. On a completely separate topic, I’ve often made the point that the “Obama recovery” is very anemic.

Well, here’s some new evidence from the Wall Street Journal.

Wow, less than half the growth we got under Reaganomics.

Seems like a good opportunity for me to reissue my two-part challenge to the left. To date, not a single statist has successfully responded.

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The Three Best and Three Worst Policy Developments of 2014

Exactly one year ago, we looked at the best and worst policy developments of 2013.

Now it’s time for a look back at 2014 to see what’s worth celebrating and what are reasons for despair.

Here’s the good news for 2014.

1. Gridlock – I’ve been arguing for nearly three years that divided government is producing better economic performance. To be sure, it would have been difficult for the economy to move in the wrong direction after the stagnation of Obama’s first two years, but heading in the wrong direction at a slower pace is better than speeding toward European-style statism.

Indeed, the fact that policy stopped getting worse even boosted America’s relative competitiveness, so there’s a lot to be thankful for when politicians disagree with each other and can’t enact new laws.

David Harsanyi explains the glory of gridlock for The Federalist.

Gross domestic product grew by a healthy 5 percent in the third quarter, the strongest growth we’ve seen since 2003. Consumer spending looks like it’s going to be strong in 2015, unemployment numbers have looked good, buying power is up and the stock market closed at 18,000 for the first time ever. All good things. So what happened? …the predominant agenda of Washington was doing nothing. It was only when the tinkering and superfluous stimulus spending wound down that fortunes began to turn around. …spending as a percent of GDP has gone down. In 2009, 125 bills were enacted into law. In 2010, 258. After that, Congress, year by year, became one of the least productive in history. And the more unproductive Washington became, the more the economy began to improve. …Gridlock has caused an odd, but pervasive, stability in Washington. Spending has been static. No jarring reforms have passed — no cap-and-trade, which would have artificially spiked energy prices and undercut the growth we’re now experiencing. The inadvertent, but reigning, policy over the past four years has been, do no harm.

Amen. Though I should hasten to add that while gridlock has been helpful in the short run (stopping Obama from achieving his dream of becoming a second FDR), at some point we will need unified government in order to adopt much-needed tax reform and entitlement reform.

The key question is whether we will ever get good politicians controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

2. Restrained Spending – This is the most under-reported and under-celebrated news of the past few years, not just 2014.

Allow me to cite one of my favorite people.

In fiscal year 2009, the federal government spent about $3.52 trillion. In fiscal year 2014 (which ended on September 30), the federal government spent about $3.50 trillion. In other words, there’s been no growth in nominal government spending over the past five years. It hasn’t received nearly as much attention as it deserves, but there’s been a spending freeze in Washington. …the fiscal restraint over the past five years has resulted in a bigger drop in the relative size of government in America than what Switzerland achieved over the past ten years thanks to the “debt brake.” …The bottom line is that the past five years have been a victory for advocates of limited government.

And this spending restraint is producing economic dividends, though Paul Krugman somehow wants people to believe that Keynesian economics deserves the credit.

3. Limits on Unemployment Benefits – Although the labor force participation rate is still disturbingly low, the unemployment rate has declined and job creation numbers have improved.

The aforementioned policies surely deserve some of the credit, but it’s also worth noting that Congress wisely put a stop to the initiative-sapping policy of endlessly extending unemployment benefits. Such policies sound compassionate, but they basically pay people not to work and cause more joblessness.

Phil Kerpen of American Commitment elaborates, citing recent research from the New York Fed.

According to empirical research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: “most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of unemployment benefit eligibility.” Those benefits finally ended at the end of 2013, triggering a sharp rise in hiring… Specifically, they found that the average extended unemployment benefits duration of 82.5 weeks for four years had the impact of raising the unemployment rate from 5 percent to 8.6 percent. …Good intentions are not enough in public policy.  It might seem kind and compassionate to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on “emergency” unemployment benefits forever, but the effect is to keep millions of people unemployed.  Results matter.

Phil’s right. If you pay people not to work, you’re going to get foolish results.

But the three above stories are not the only rays of sunshine in 2014. Honorable mention goes to North Carolina and Kansas for implementing pro-growth tax reforms.

I’m also pleased that GOPers passed the first half of my test and told the Democrat appointee at the Congressional Budget Office that he would be replaced. Now the question is whether they appoint someone who will make the long-overdue changes that are needed to get better and more accurate assessments of fiscal policy. That didn’t happen when the GOP had control between 1995 and 2007, so victory is far from assured.

And another honorable mention is that Congress has not expanded the IMF’s bailout authority.

Now let’s look at the three worst policy developments of 2014.

1. Obamacare Subsidies – Yes, Obamacare has been a giant albatross for the President and his party. Yes, the law has helped more and more people realize that big government isn’t a good idea. Those are positive developments.

Nonetheless, 2014 was the year when the subsidies began to flow. And once handouts begin, politicians get very squeamish about taking them away.

This is why I wrote back in 2012 that Obamacare may have been a victory (in the long run) for the left, even though it caused dozens of Democrats to lose their seats in the House and Senate.

I think the left made a clever calculation that losses in the last cycle would be an acceptable price to get more people dependent on the federal government. And once people have to rely on government for something like healthcare, they are more likely to vote for the party that promises to make government bigger. …This is why Obamacare – and the rest of the entitlement state – is so worrisome. If more and more Americans decide to ride in the wagon of government dependency, it will be less and less likely that those people will vote for candidates who want to restrain government.

Simply stated, when more and more people get hooked on the heroin of government dependency, I fear you get the result portrayed in this set of cartoons.

2. Continuing Erosion of Tax Competition – Regular readers know that I view jurisdictional competition as a very valuable constraint on the greed of the political class.

Simply stated, politicians will be less likely to impose punitive tax policies if the geese with the golden eggs can fly away. That’s why I cheer when taxpayers escape high-tax jurisdictions, whether we’re looking at New Jersey and California, or France and the United States.

But this also helps to explain why governments, either unilaterally or multilaterally, are trying to prevent taxpayers from shifting economic activity to low-tax jurisdictions.

And 2014 was not a good year for taxpayers. We saw further implementation of FATCA, ongoing efforts by the OECD to raise the tax burden on the business community, and even efforts by the United Nations to further erode tax competition.

Here’s an example, from the Wall Street Journal, of politicians treating taxpayers like captive serfs.

Japan could become the latest country to consider taxing wealthy individuals who move abroad to take advantage of lower rates. The government and ruling party lawmakers are considering an “exit tax”… Such a rule would prevent wealthy individuals moving to a location where taxes are low–such as Singapore or Hong Kong… some expats in Tokyo are concerned the rule could make companies think twice about sending senior professionals to Japan or make Japanese entrepreneurs more reluctant to go abroad.

My reaction, for what it’s worth, is that Japan should reduce tax rates if it wants to keep people (and their money) from emigrating.

3. Repeating the Mistakes that Caused the Housing Crisis – A corrupt system of subsidies for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combined with other misguided policies from Washington, backfired with a housing bubble and financial crisis in 2008.

Inexplicably, the crowd in Washington has learned nothing from that disaster. New regulations are being proposed to once again provide big subsidies that will destabilize the housing market.

Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute warns that politicians are planting the seeds for another mess.

New standards were supposed to raise the quality of the “prime” mortgages that get packaged and sold to investors; instead, they will have the opposite effect. …the standards have been watered down. …The regulators believe that lower underwriting standards promote homeownership and make mortgages and homes more affordable. The facts, however, show that the opposite is true. …low underwriting standards — especially low down payments — drive housing prices up, making them less affordable for low- and moderate-income buyers, while also inducing would-be homeowners to take more risk. That’s why homes were more affordable before the 1990s than they are today. … The losers, as we saw in the financial crisis, are borrowers of modest means who are lured into financing arrangements they can’t afford. When the result is foreclosure and eviction, one of the central goals of homeownership — building equity — is undone.

Gee, it’s almost as if Chuck Asay had perfect foresight when drawing this cartoon.

Let’s end today’s post with a few dishonorable mentions.

In addition to the three developments we just discussed, I’m also very worried about the ever-growing red tape burden. This is a hidden tax that undermines economic efficiency and enables cronyism.

I continue to be irked that my tax dollars are being used to subsidize a very left-wing international bureaucracy in Paris.

And it’s very sad that one of the big success stories of economic liberalization is now being undermined.

P.S. This is the feel-good story of the year.

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