2/2: #BestOf2021: Second Term agenda? 2/2 The New Global Taxman. Richard Epstein, Hoover Institution (Originally posted June 14, 2021)
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John Batchelor
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🗓️ 6 January 2023
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2/2: #BestOf2021: Second Term agenda? 2/2 The New Global Taxman. Richard Epstein, Hoover Institution (Originally posted June 14, 2021)
The Biden administration works within a progressive framework that does not seek to use the tax system to strengthen market institutions. So it took a different line. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen stated that the imposition of the uniform minimum tax is meant to reduce the risk of a corporate “race to the bottom,” a view that insists that all competition across jurisdictions leads firms to move to a place where insiders are best able to exploit outsiders, by rigging the rules in their own favor. The administration then doubled down on this view when the White House announced that the G-7 leaders agree to “continue providing policy support to the global economy for as long as necessary to create a strong, balanced, and inclusive economic recovery.”
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| 0:57.0 | We're not addressing that now. I want to raise the possibility of, is this efficient? Richard |
| 1:03.0 | is a classical liberal, so I'm asking him a question that is transnational. Also, what |
| 1:07.7 | does this mean about China's large corporations, which are certainly competitive? Will we tax |
| 1:12.9 | them? |
| 1:13.9 | Well, I mean, you're asking all the right questions, |
| 1:17.1 | do we share no easy answers, but let's just assume that you could do this thing worldwide |
| 1:21.7 | and the Chinese and the Russians and everybody else is going to be drawn into the same |
| 1:25.7 | part. What you do is you look at these large corporations and you have to ask two questions. |
| 1:30.9 | One is this about result of efficiencies, two is this about the result of restraint |
| 1:35.8 | on trade. If it's a result of restraint on trade, then presumably some kind of an anti-trust |
| 1:41.1 | remedy would be appropriate, but that would not be to the entire firm. It would be with |
| 1:45.6 | respect to the particular practices given lines of commerce that might be subject to |
| 1:51.1 | it. So if you wish to attack Apple at Google, they engage in a thousand different practices. |
| 1:56.2 | 998 of them may be legal and two of them may be wrong. The anti-trust solution would |
| 2:01.0 | pick the two or the 20 of the 50 and I turn out to be incorrect and then try to go after |
| 2:05.7 | them. There's a lot of difficulty there because there's a kind of wrong kind of mentality |
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