In a press release published today, the European Commission set out its ideas for the future taxation of the financial sector. Underlining that the financial sector needs to make a fair contribution to public finances, and that governments urgently need new sources of revenue, the Commission puts forward a two pronged approach. At global level, the Commission supports the idea of a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT), which is supposed to help fund development and climate change. At EU level, the Commission recommends a Financial Activities Tax (FAT).
Politicians and interest groups in the USA claim higher taxes are necessary because it would be impossible to cut spending by enough to get rid of red ink. This Center for Freedom and Prosperity video shows that these assertions are nonsense. The budget can be balanced very quickly by simply limiting the annual growth of federal spending.
Portugal has a long tradition of corporate tax evasion. Perception of high tax burden, social tolerance to fraud and evasion, high psychological fiscal pressure* , instability and insecurity of the tax codes and complex and slow fiscal system are the factors usually pointed as the ultimate causes for this phenomenon.
Singapore will host tomorrow the Global Tax Forum 2010. According to Dan Mitchell from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, the OECD will attempt there to promote a project against tax competition. This project received a boost when the Obama Administration joined forces with countries such as France and Germany, but the tide is now turning against high-tax nations – particularly as more people understand that such an approach inevitably leads to Greek-style fiscal collapse.
2009/2010 has been a period of phoney fiscalism in the United Kingdom. The period is sandwiched between the economic crisis, which put fiscal policy onto an emergency, macro-economic footing and an election (May 6th 2010). Economic crisis has been marked in the UK as in most other countries by a severe worsening of the fiscal balance which has been supported for now by government borrowing and straightforward money-creation (“quantitative easing”). The political constraint of election has led to a more than usually cosmetic approach to changes in the structure of taxation.
This is the number of US government regulatory agencies for financial services before the 2008 crisis, according to Prof. Laurence Kotlikoff’s most recent book, Jimmy Stewart is Dead. Obviously, the…
This is the estimation of lost output for every dollar of government spending that made the University of Chicago’s professor Harald Uhlig in a paper published by the American Economic…
This is the problem that government representatives are discussing at the United Nations antipoverty summit this week.
The French President Nicolas Sarkozy hurried up to announce that despite of its deficits France will increase its aid by 20% and become the second world contributor after the USA. Donating public money, he added, is not enough to help end poverty and meet other U.N. goals. He renewed France’s push for a small international tax on financial transactions. This proves, if anything else two things : that the French President has an interesting understanding of the concept of “donation” and that he has no understanding at all of how development works.
Economic freedom around the world fell for the first time in decades, according to the Economic Freedom of the World: 2010 Annual Report, released by the Cato Institute in conjunction with the Fraser Institute of Canada. In this year’s index, Hong Kong retains the highest rating for economic freedom, followed by Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, Chile, the United States, Canada, Australia, Mauritius, and the United Kingdom.
It’s not unusual to hear people criticise the fiscal competition states engage in, pretending that such practices lead to losses in tax revenues. In this matter, the expression “harmful fiscal competition”, which is notably retained by the European Union, is often used, though sometimes inappropriately. The “harmful” character of fiscal competition between states is actually rather questionable and one may seriously doubt the very existence of such a harmful character, regardless of its form and the circumstances that accompany it.
