US policy chief Janet Yellen makes idiotic call
The single most important economic policymaking adviser in the world has revealed herself to be utterly clueless by calling for a “global minimum corporate tax rate”.
Terry McCrann
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IT should be extremely disturbing that the single most important economic policymaking adviser in the world has revealed herself to be utterly clueless.
She is President Joe Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen. And yes, that – “President Biden’s” - ownership description is both appropriate and accurate, as she also went out of her way to deliberately shill for Biden politically by gratuitously sliming his predecessor President Trump.
Yellen revealed her cluelessness by calling for a “global minimum corporate tax rate”.
This is so embarrassingly clueless on so many levels – and I do not mean the policy argument on whether high or low or indeed any corporate tax is theoretically better. Indeed, you could argue for a “global maximum corporate tax rate”.
No, just the sheer, utter and what should be blindingly obvious impossibility of getting such a global agreement.
And if we did get such an agreement, at least on paper, it wouldn’t be worth that paper, no matter how elegant and embellished, on which it was written.
Hasn’t Yellen heard of tax avoidance and tax evasion?
Hasn’t she heard of tax loopholes, some discovered by ‘clever’ – and if not really clever, seriously rich – lawyers and accounts?
But also indeed, deliberate loopholes, put in tax legislation by the politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists themselves.
Look at our own system of franking credits? Apart from moderating the real corporate tax rate, it gives that benefit only on Australian company tax paid.
That would have to be illegal under ‘her’ proposal. Would we give it up? What hope would we have of ensuring every other country – and indeed, states within countries - gave up all their thousands of similar and also very different tax offsets.
The only meaningful “global minimum corporate tax rate” – even, especially, among the G20 biggest economies – would be company tax law reduced to a single page and indeed a single sentence.
It would be that agreed minimum rate and it would be a rate applied on company revenue and not (taxable) profit, to avoid all the problems – and opportunities – created for tax minimisation between the revenue line and the taxable profit line.
Why stop at company tax? What about a “global minimum wage”? And would that be set at Australia’s or Germany’s, or the US’s or China’s, or Zimbabwe’s?
Does Yellen even begin to understand the competitive world in which we live; and the way countries use tax rates – and a myriad of other policies – to achieve not only national policies, but a multitude of specific aims.
Like, precisely special tax deductions, accelerated depreciation etc etc.
Does Yellen even begin to faintly understand that countries – shock, horror, wash my mouth out with soap – cheat?
And very especially one country in particular, which as a consequence now has something like 50 per cent – maybe even more - of the entire world’s manufacturing; and has absolutely no intention of ceding any of that to global co-operation and global fairness.
I’m sure she’s a big fan of the Fake Paris Climate Accord, which allows that ‘certain country’ to keep increasing its CO2 emissions, already easily the biggest in the world at more than one-third of global emissions, without any limit in size or even time.
All China has done is to ‘promise’ to ‘try’ to cap per capita emissions by 2030. For that the developed world has committed, at least on paper – the Europeans are and will continue to cheat – to cripple itself industrially.
In sliming President Trump, Yellen unwittingly and of course unknowingly revealed her cluelessness, because he well understood those realities and was acting to deal with and counter them.
None of this is surprising. Yellen has had only limited exposure to reality, outside the – profitably comfortable - triple bubbles of academia, the Fed and Wall St.
Originally published as US policy chief Janet Yellen makes idiotic call
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