The emergence of a global government cartel without any restrictions to tax and spend their citizens’ wealth would lead to a world that is less free and less prosperous. The financial and economic crisis that unfolded from 2008 has led many governments to intensify their efforts against what has been dubbed “tax evasion”, i.e., the protection of wealth or capital outside a citizen’s or a firm’s home country.
Taxes
French richest woman Liliane Bettencourt has been caught up by the fiscal authorities for tax avoidance. Mrs Bettencourt, they reveal, has an offshore bank accounts and acquired hiddenly an island…
The sovereign debt crisis forces our governments to stretch their imagination in order to find additional budget revenues. In Europe, as well as in the US, many voices call for additional contributions from the rich (not such a big stretch of imagination, in fact, if it was for the already high contribution asked from them). Interestingly, some eminent wealthy people like Warren Buffet in the US or Liliane Bettencourt (L’Oréal) in France welcome the idea, denouncing a system that deprives them from the possibility of making an equitable tax contribution (read more about this here).
The Coalition for Tax Competition asked members of the US Congress to cut the $100 million taxpayer subsidy to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Citing the OECD’s record as an opponent of tax competition, the letter released by the coaltion argues that US taxpayers should not be funding an organization which works against their interests by promoting a statist agenda.
Yesterday, the US President Obama announced a new debt plan built on taxes on rich. He called for $1.5 trillion in new taxes on upper income taxpayers. His plan would end Bush-era tax cuts for top earners and would limit their deductions. This proposal is following the public debate on the issue of high-income taxes, launched by the investor Warren Buffet few weeks ago. In the following paper, Toni Mascaró reminds us why this approach to taxes and deficits is wrong.
According to the New York Times, President Obama will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year. The investor Warren Buffett inspired…
The game of representative democracy is such that we constantly have to choose, not between policies, but between programs that are best seen as baskets of policies to be implemented if the candidate supporting that program is elected. The basket that the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, “sold” to his electors in 2007 was, as always, made of all kinds of policies. But there was one on which he particularly insisted on during the elections and that, in my opinion, brought him the support from many voters: the promise that, if he was elected, individuals who will work more will earn more. “Travailler plus pour gagner plus”– with those words, he was promoting a move away from a society in which the extra money you make is redistributed away from you. At least that’s the way many people understood it.
After being seriously blamed by Italian Minister of finances Giulio Tremont last month, Switzerland finally finds itself largely approved on its private savings policy in the recently revealed by the EU Commission report on enforcement of taxation on savings regulation. As a matter of fact, France is the only EU country to accuse Swiss banks to implement mechanisms allowing some of the savings on Swiss bank accounts to avoid taxation in accordance with the agreement signed with the EU in 2004. The conflict opposing Switzerland and the EU on savings taxation lasts from several years now. Here is a brief history of the issue by Pierre Bessard, IREF fellow.
More than 100 member countries representatives participated in the annual meeting of the Global Tax Forum in Bermuda. The Global Forum is charged with the monitoring and peer review of the implementation of the standards of transparency and exchange of information for tax purposes. It became notorious with the publication three years ago of grey and black lists of alleged “tax havens”.
Portugal is the third EU country after Greece and Ireland to need financial bail-out in order to avoid bankruptcy of the State. How did things go so wrong and for what reason – is it only the fault of the international financial crisis, or – more probably – bad management of public finances from the Potuguese government? Ricardo Campelo de Magalhães answers those questions in the light of a detailed analysis of Portuguese fiscal policy.