RE-ELECT TRAIN: 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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🗓️ 31 August 2023
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Summary
https://www.hoover.org/research/sorting-out-global-tax-mess
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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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachel. Professor Richard Epstein of the Hoover Institution |
| 0:09.6 | is here to help me with these global tax ideas. There are three of them. We've discussed |
| 0:15.2 | the idea of a minimum tax globally. Now we turn to the taxes on the 100 largest corporations, |
| 0:21.9 | multi-nationals, how you discern that list is important, but we're not addressing that |
| 0:28.7 | now. I want to raise the possibility of, is this efficient? Richard is a classical liberal, |
| 0:34.4 | so I'm asking him a question that is transnational. And also, what does this mean about China's |
| 0:39.8 | large corporations, which are certainly competitive? Will we tax them? |
| 0:44.5 | Well, I mean, you're asking all the right questions to which there are no easy answers, |
| 0:49.0 | but let's just assume that you could do this thing worldwide and the Chinese and the Russians |
| 0:53.6 | and everybody else is going to be drawn into the same pot. What you do is you look at |
| 0:57.8 | these large corporations and you have to ask two questions. One, is this about result |
| 1:02.8 | of efficiencies? Two, is this about the result of restraint on trade? If it's a result |
| 1:08.2 | of restraint on trade, then presumably some kind of an antitrust remedy would be appropriate. |
| 1:13.2 | But that would not be to the entire firm. It would be with respect to the particular |
| 1:17.0 | practices given lines of commerce that might be subject to itself. If you wish to attack |
| 1:23.0 | Apple or Google, they engage in a thousand different practices. 998 of them may be legal |
| 1:28.6 | and two of them may be wrong. The antitrust solution would pick the two or the 20 or the |
| 1:33.0 | 50. And I turn out to be incorrect and then try to go after them. There's a lot of difficulty |
| 1:37.8 | there because there's a kind of wrong kind of mentality around the United States. The |
| 1:43.0 | Colbert should build, for example, in which everybody starts to see antitrust risks where, |
| 1:47.5 | frankly, I don't believe that they exist. But that's a fraction. Now, if you want to go |
| 1:51.8 | with global remedies, and you say, OK, we've got Jeff Bezos, why are we taxing him when |
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