5 ms·

A minimum tax is a bad idea. Taxes tend to creep up, and the main pressure against that is for companies or people to leave.

• fastball 1y ago
  That mechanism would still exist, no? Just that the entity leaving is countries from an agreement, not companies from a country.
  • jules 1y ago
    How would the incentives of that work?
    • fastball 1y ago
      A country recognizes that the rate of company creation has gone done (or some similar metric). They identify the tax rate as a reason for this. They want the tax rate to be lower to ameliorate this. They leave the agreement. Now presumably there are penalties or such in place for this type of agreement, so it would need to be weighed as onerous enough to accept any such penalties. If it is just one country that feels this way then it might be a non-starter, but if the global minimum tax gets to a point where many countries feel this way, it would probably be viable to coordinate to leave the agreement all at once, with the remainers having little power at that point.
• thrance 1y ago
  > Taxes tend to creep up Citation needed, corporate taxes have been going down for decades. > companies or people to leave. "We can't ever tax anyone because else they would just leave; ergo nothing can or should be done about rampant inequality" is not only false, it is extremely dangerous and accelerates the fall of our democracies.
  • mattmaroon 1y ago
    Also, the whole point of the agreement is that the tax is global so there’s nowhere to leave to.
    • jules 1y ago
      Yes and that is bad, because cartels are bad. Competition between political systems is good, for much the same reason that competition between companies is good.
      • mattmaroon 1y ago
        I disagree that that is always the case and think that viewpoint is overly dogmatic and impractical. Government is nothing if not a legal cartel. Companies competing to make the best product is good. Tiny nations stealing corporations domiciles by offering low tax rates hurts investment in first world economies, the kind we want everyone to have.
        • jules 1y ago
          How does it hurt investment? Those tiny nations are only helping eliminate an inefficient form of taxation. The main problem is that only multinationals can make use of it.
          • thrance 1y ago
            Hiding huge amounts of money in tax havens is actively detrimental to the economy. I believe the goal of any economy should be to better our lives, not hoard wealth and sit on it. Without taxation, the infrastructures needed to maintain a healthy economy are unsustainable. We need to ensure that what companies benefit from public services is taken back so it can be reinvested.
            • jules 1y ago
              Money is not "hidden" or "hoarded" in tax havens, nor does hoarding money affect the economy negatively. Taxation is necessary for infrastructure (though that is actually a small fraction: about 3% of US federal taxes goes to infrastructure), and I did not say or imply that taxation is unnecessary. The question of what the best level of taxation is, and what the best place to levy those taxes is, cannot be decided based on high level slogans. One thing is clear though: standardizing tax rates is bad because it removes the competitive aspect between countries. It is good if people and companies are able to move to the places that give them the best public services for the least cost, for the same reason that it is good that salaries are not standardized between companies, and the same reason why it is good that airline ticket prices are no longer standardized by the IATA and CAB.
• delusional 1y ago
  > and the main pressure against that is for companies or people to leave. Has there been any serious research in this area that supports that conclusion. My impression, which is completely uninformed I admit, is that we often talk about companies leaving due to high tax burdens, but that it rarely happens. It's a politically signal, more than a factual systemic driver. Sure, a bunch of companies have relocated to tax havens, but we're not going to solve that by regressing to a 2% universal tax rate.
• watwut 1y ago
  Oh please, as far as USA goes, taxes went down especially for companies and rich. And the country is in the process of creating new massive deficit just by a massive tax cut.
• ruicraveiro 1y ago
  Leave to where to avoid a global minimum tax? To Mars?
• throwawa14223 1y ago
  Beyond that it is actually evil.