While You Sleep An Ugly Root Grows

1. 83

   Sharlee01posted 9 months ago

   Did you know about this?  Maybe it might just interest you.
   
   
   It’s been said that there are two things certain in life: death and taxes. With Joe Biden as president of the United States, you can also be sure that you will be paying more than your fair share of the taxes you owe.
   
   "Americans have already been crushed by inflation caused by the Biden administration. But now, they want to add fuel to the fire by giving American taxes to foreign countries, raising costs for Americans, and sticking us with the bill for funding a global socialist agenda.
   
   Over the past two years, President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have negotiated A GLOBAL MINIMUM TAX through the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). This organization surrenders America’s sovereignty over our tax code and allows foreign countries to take our taxes that were meant for our own essential programs and military.
   
   In short, Biden and Yellen were failures in their tax negotiations. Now Republicans in Congress must clean up their mess.
   
   BIDEN'S GLOBAL TAX SURRENDER HURTS US BUSINESSES, WORKERS, ECONOMY. HERE'S HOW
   
   At a time when the United States is actively vying to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving global economy, allowing American businesses to be subjected to mandatory foreign taxes that would pay for woke, green policies in other countries are irrational and absurd.
   
   "Globalists" will tell you this is better for the American economy. They are wrong.
   
   The Founding Fathers purposely entrusted Congress with developing our country’s tax code. We will not cede that authority to unelected global bureaucrats, as President Biden wants to do.
   
   As our debt crisis is looming, the United States should be focused on putting money back into our economy, instead of funding other countries’ pet projects. I can guarantee that as long as Republicans have the majority, we will never approve of Biden’s terrible deal.
   
   With the failure of the current negotiations with the OECD, the United States’ economic standing was drastically weakened. China is laughing at our weak leadership for subjecting our own people to global socialism. While the Biden administration continues virtue signaling through misguided policy making, America falls further behind our adversaries.
   
   Until last year, the United States was the only country in the world with a global minimum tax. Here at home, U.S. corporations already face a 21% tax rate. Congress has a long history of using the tax code to incentivize certain behavior from businesses and individuals.
   
   We cannot give up our right to use the tax code to promote our own interests. If we force businesses to pay taxes to other countries, America’s economy will shrink while other countries’ will grow.
   
   All 25 Republicans of the Ways and Means Committee sponsored the Defending American Jobs and Investment Act. This bill requires the Treasury Department to identify taxes enacted by foreign countries that attack U.S. businesses, like the Undertaxed Profits Rule (UTPR).
   
   The UTPR’s goal is to force countries to enact the OECD plan for global socialism and collect more tax dollars from American businesses. The OECD is actively working against American interests, even while the United States funds 20% of its yearly budget. Republicans in Congress have promised to end all funding for the OECD if it continues along this dangerous path.
   
   Why does the Biden administration insist on increasing taxes for the American people?
   
   In a previous Ways and Means Committee hearing, I warned that any country that has implemented the UTPR will suffer the consequences. As history as shown, American’s don’t take kindly to taxes by foreign countries. We will continue to fight against the OECD’s socialist policies that take money illegally from American taxpayers.
   
   Illegal taxation from countries that claim to be our closest allies violates numerous treaties and international norms. Unnecessary taxation is theft. The Ways and Means Committee will implement a needed check on the Biden administration to stop them from taking more tax dollars and giving them to foreign countries. I will continue to fight for the America First agenda."
   
   https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/quiet-n … nt-tax-you
   
   Do you want a Socialist Government? It might be wise to wake up to what is being done while you sleep... Changes that are not well reported have very much taken root. They are not hiding changes, you can find many things right on our Government websites. But who's looking?
   
   Statement from Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen on the European Union Directive Implementing a Global Minimum Tax
   
   https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1170

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2. 83

   Sharlee01posted 9 months ago

   Bloomberg OP --   Mike Crapo
   Senate Finance Committee
   "The Biden administration’s Pillar Two tax agreement with the OECD has pushed the US into a subsidy race to the bottom that favors foreign countries—especially China, says Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho).
   
   For the last two years, the Biden administration has touted a tall tale about its tax negotiations at the OECD—that the agreement they reached will end the race to the bottom and ensure big corporations pay their fair share in taxes.
   
   But in a late-breaking plot twist, it is now apparent that the agreement may do the opposite: embolden countries to subsidize big businesses in government-favored industries. In the ultimate irony, the agreement’s new tax regime largely carves out government grants and certain tax subsidies, allowing countries such as China to game the system. Even Biden’s former chief negotiator at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development acknowledges the problem.
   
   Unsurprisingly, an agreement rewarding subsidies would favor China. Democrats’ apparent solution? Attempting to stoop to China’s level by enacting hundreds of billions of dollars of green energy subsidies into law, which are now estimated to cost US taxpayers far more—potentially over $1 trillion. The Inflation Reduction Act created a new subsidy race to the bottom, and we are now trying to compete with China at a high-stakes game of socialism-lite that we shouldn’t even play.
   
   How did we get here? Just a few years ago, Congress supported—on a bipartisan basis—the objective for the international tax negotiations taking place at the OECD: to end discriminatory taxation of US businesses. But the Biden administration decided to abandon that goal without consulting Congress, favoring rhetoric over substance when it negotiated a cartel-like global tax code that creates a trilogy of new taxes. As with any tax policy, the devil is in the details.
   
   The first act of the agreement’s trilogy of new taxes mandated a 15% minimum level of tax on large companies across the globe. While the US already has a global minimum tax for its companies, created in Republicans’ 2017 tax reform law, the Biden administration capitulated on the Trump administration’s insistence in negotiations that our minimum tax should be treated as equivalent to any OECD-sanctioned one.
   
   It gets worse. To secure this deal, under part two of the tax trilogy, the Biden administration agreed to the global tax code’s enforcement mechanism that invites foreign governments to pursue new discriminatory taxes against our companies. This extraterritorial enforcement mechanism—the Undertaxed Profits Rule—blatantly undermines important, job-creating tax policies passed by Congress on a bipartisan basis. Unsurprisingly, foreign governments—after securing much better treatment for their preferred incentive methods of subsidies and grants—eagerly agreed to a deal creating newfound opportunities to grab revenue from our companies.
   
   The third part rubs salt in the wound. Not only did this administration negotiate a bad deal for US workers and businesses, the final act in this tax trilogy also will drain the US purse. The global tax code provides a sanctioned pathway for each foreign government to enact its own 15% domestic minimum top-up tax on income earned by large businesses in that country.
   
   What’s the rub? The administration agreed to give foreign governments priority to soak up taxes collected by the US under the TCJA minimum tax. In other words, this administration handed each foreign government a robust vacuum to suck away tens of billions of dollars of our tax base—and then turn around to use those dollars to fund foreign subsidies.
   
   How does that fly? It’s the result of the most indefensible position agreed to by the administration: the arbitrary and disparate treatment of investment incentives embedded in each tax in the trilogy. Specifically, the type of investment incentives Congress has traditionally enacted through the US tax code—nonrefundable tax credits such as the R&D credit—receive prejudiced treatment under the agreement compared to refundable credits and subsidies used more commonly in other countries.
   
   This administration’s narrative that the global tax code will stop the race to the bottom in tax competition is intellectually dishonest and rings quite hollow. In reality, if one even believes in this rhetoric, the global tax code will create a more nefarious, supercharged push for increased subsidies and grants in government-favored industries.
   
   Who will receive a leg up from this arbitrary distinction anointed by OECD technocrats and blessed by the Biden administration? The Treasury Department’s lack of transparency indicates they may prefer that US taxpayers and Congress not know.
   
   Treasury has repeatedly declined to provide any data or analysis of the effect of the OECD deal on US revenue—not even to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation—so that independent estimates and analysis can be developed and provided to Congress. Nor have there been any public consultations or hearings in either congressional tax writing committee to discuss the agreement. It is almost as if the administration would rather hide the ramifications its tax trilogy will have on our economy.
   
   But we don’t need the data to understand that a global tax code rewarding subsidies will boost Beijing. The hundreds of billions of dollars in annual subsidies China bestows on its favored domestic companies, which it does far more than other countries, are treated preferentially.
   
   At bottom, this global tax code is an America Last policy. It undermines congressional sovereignty to enact tax policy and vaults foreign countries ahead by blessing their preferred methods of investment incentives, and it specifically cedes ground to China.
   
   We don’t know how the administration plans to convince Congress to implement this agreement. Neither the administration nor congressional Democrats can unilaterally modify the US tax code or our treaties to implement it. While protecting US interests should be a bipartisan effort, congressional Republicans won’t sit idly by as US companies’ profits are taxed to benefit foreign countries’ coffers.
   
   If other countries move forward with extraterritorial taxes, including the UTPR tax, we will be forced to pursue countermeasures to protect US workers, businesses, and the fisc. And if the OECD continues to encourage other countries to implement a global tax code that threatens US sovereignty and enriches China, they should be funding their work without the help of American taxpayers.
   
   At bottom, the global tax code proclaims that “tax competition is bad, but government handouts are good.” Unfortunately, the Democrats bought into this subsidy race to the bottom when they enacted hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies for their favored industries. We can confidently predict how a race against China on government handouts will end."

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3. 83

   Sharlee01posted 9 months ago

   A Global Minimum Corporate Tax Is a Bad Idea Whose Time Hasn’t Come
   https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/gl … -bad-idea/
   
   Some ideas are so absurd, the adage goes, that only an intellectual could believe them. The global minimum corporate tax outlined by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is one of them. The proposal will not only embarrass U.S. President Joe Biden because of its likely failure, but could also empower countries seeking to undermine the liberal international order, especially China and Russia.
   
   The underlying concept’s resonance with liberal politicians like U.S. President Joe Biden is as unsurprising as its appeal to a liberal intellectual like Yellen. The world’s governments would start approaching multinational corporations like they approach the labor market—only instead of a global minimum wage, they would collectively demand a global minimum tax. The intended effect: more money for governments and less money for corporations. To its proponents, an equal minimum tax has an appealing moral clarity. And it’s an elegant concept in economic theory.
   
   In practice, however, the policy’s odds of success are slim.
   
   For starters, multilateralism will stumble in tax policy for the same reason it can be so successful in trade policy: the incentives for joining versus staying out. In a trade deal, the economic benefits of membership grow as more countries join and the size of the market made accessible by the trade deal increases. With a global minimum tax, however, the economic benefit to any one country that stays out grows as more countries join. As a non-member grows, you can outcompete the global market via lower taxes.
   
   Take Ireland, which has become a favorite location for global multinationals in part because of its very favorable tax code. If a small country like Ireland stayed out of a free-trade regime like the European Union, it’d be shooting itself in the foot. On taxes, however, staying out of any global tax deal would ensure it can still have a tax code that allows it to remain more attractive to global corporations than most countries. That means Ireland will likely fight tooth and nail to stay out of any global minimum tax regime.
   
   
   Second, the domestic political maneuvering that any successful global minimum corporate tax would require in many countries makes the politics of trade look enviable. Many member states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have federal systems, where regional and local governments impose taxes on corporations to no small extent. This fiscal federalism typically reflects political federalism, which, in turn, reflects a country’s foundational political compromises. A uniform minimum tax would, in various federally organized countries, reawaken long-settled constitutional
   
   questions about the balance of power between central and subnational governments.
   
   In a federal country, such as the United States, Canada, Germany, Japan, or Switzerland, any functioning global minimum corporate tax system would require an unprecedented degree of tax homogenization and coordination among national, regional, and local jurisdictions. And these jurisdictions would be a constant source of potential loopholes and other troubles in any minimum tax system.
   
   Suppose there is a 25 percent global minimum tax and Canada’s provincial taxes are 10 percent. If Canada’s national government implements the 25 percent rate, companies end up paying 35 percent total, putting Canada at a
   permanent disadvantage relative to countries with no subnational taxes. On the other hand, suppose Canada’s national government allows companies to deduct regional taxes from their national corporate tax bill. That would turn the provincial corporate tax into a device for transferring tax revenue away from the national government—and into a source of political conflict between national and subnational governments.
   
   The United States is another case where federalism would likely vex any serious attempts to homogenize corporate taxation under a  minimum tax regime. U.S. governors and mayors have a habit of offering carrots like tax breaks to lure businesses and jobs to their constituents. They wouldn’t be happy if they had to break that habit. If the federal government tried to prohibit governors and mayors from granting these types of concessions on corporate taxes, they could simply use other concessions. Instead of corporate tax breaks, California’s governor could offer corporations “green” subsidies, for instance. Even if national governments were to commit to refraining from these types of equivalent subsidies—and there is little reason to  believe they will, except perhaps on paper—they’d need to somehow tie the hands of regional and local governments. And for national governments to assert power that way, entire constitutions might need to be rewritten.
   
   In fact, the United States may be among the worst positioned of OECD members to lead a global coalition on a minimum corporate tax. If the Biden administration were to sign an international treaty establishing a global minimum tax, that signature would be a partisan lightning rod  much like the Iran nuclear deal, with little chance of passing in the U.S. Senate. If, on the other hand, a global minimum tax is merely a handshake agreement between heads of government and implemented in the United States by executive order, the policy is unlikely to last a day longer than a Democratic administration. All foreign governments will know this, making them wary of paying their own political costs at home in exchange for an ephemeral multilateral deal. Please read on ---   https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/gl … -bad-idea/

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4. 83

   Sharlee01posted 9 months ago

   BIDEN'S GLOBAL TAX DEAL WILL HARM AMERICAN COMPETITIVENESS
   
   President Biden wants to use international negotiations to push Democrats’ partisan tax hikes in the U.S.
   
   His administration brokered an international tax agreement that would make American companies less competitive and leave U.S. workers behind.
   
   The Biden deal would force the United States to raise its first-of-a-kind global minimum tax while failing to protect U.S. tax incentives that support domestic innovation, investment, and job creation.
   
   https://www.rpc.senate.gov/policy-paper … titiveness
   
   The OECD’s global minimum tax rate will cost US companies
   https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/353 … companies/

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