Con rammarico la decisione degli Stati Uniti di ritirarsi dall’accordo fiscale globale – Commissario UE

>Mr Sefcovic said he regretted Mr Trump’s decision to pull the US from the Paris agreement to fight climate change, which “continues to be the best hope for us all”. In response the EU would “stay the course” and continue its efforts to transition towards a greener economy, he said.

I think this quote is pretty telling and sums up the EU in a nutshell. The EU will stay on a course long after all the other major powers have abandoned it until it no longer makes any sense.

We need to stop buying their oil and lift sanctions off Venezuela. They are significantly less dangerous than those maniacs. 

If nothing else, is ‘regretful’ the right word? Can a decision be regretful?

Even under Thatcher in the UK corporation tax was 30%, at the same time under Reagan in the US it was 35%.

Having it at 15% or below is a massive burden on host countries to the exclusive benefit of the wealthy.

The American right would call Reagan a communist today.

Pro business move, let’s have those US companies that moved to Ireland come back to the motherland.

Set up rules for US-Companies and persons doing business in Europe and implement them rigorously. No tax havens.

Oh poop! Not good for Ireland at all. This has the potential to littraly bring Ireland to its knees. Question is, what can Ireland give to Trump?

The minimum global tax deal was one of the most innovative inventions since the eighties. The problem with taxes is simply that the state needs them to fund its basic functions, like a school system. But there is this stupid race to the bottom between countries where they try to attract companies by lowering their tax rate. The result is a strange dystopia, where there are a lot of companies, the GDP soars, everything looks fine on paper, but the state atrophies to nothing.

Yet these insane politicians can only act according some religious belief system. In the eighties the invention of Reagen and Thatcher were the realization that corporate tax rates were too high, they were strangling the economy. Lowering them stimulated said companies with a bearable loss in state revenues. But bear in mind that these results were obtained under wildly different circumstances. For instance in the UK corporate tax rate was 52%, half of the earnings of a company went to taxes.

Nowadays the problem is the complete opposite, corporate tax rates are at a historic low. Decreasing these will have negligible effects on the economy, due to the principle of diminishing returns. If you earn 100 GBP and will pay 52 as taxes, decreasing that to 35%, you will be able to keep 65 GBP instead of 48, a 35% increase in your profit. But decreasing 15% tax rate to 10% will mean you can keep 90 GBP instead of 85, a measly 6% increase in your earnings, although in both cases the state’s tax revenues are decreased by a third.

Tax cuts in this environment are useless, the economy can not be stimulated anymore, but they decrease state revenues. Just blindly following some policy that worked in the past under entirely different circumstances will be useless.

Oh no, more finger wagging?

/s