Ready for a new tax? White House Budget Director Jeff Zients is—he thinks we need a global minimum tax. You know… so nobody is escaping from their “fair share.”
Fair share? Hardly. As Pat put it, “Their fair share is a race to the bottom.”
Stu also pointed out, “…they never suggest a global maximum tax. It’s always ‘everyone should pay more’ or, at least—there should be some limit at some point of the minimum you should pay. I’d like someone to suggest the opposite at some point.”
One has to wonder if progressives ever really think through these brilliant ideas of theirs. For instance, Pat would like to know, “who administers a Global Minimum Tax? To whom is the tax paid, and where does it go? How is it distributed? Who collects it?”
All good questions considering there is no global entity to collect or enforce a global tax, unless you give that power to the U.N., which sounds like a horrible idea. Is that what progressives are trying to do?
Stu tried to give him the benefit of the doubt by suggesting that Zients may be referring to global in a since of “over the entire sort of sphere of income. Everything needs to be taxed as a minimum rate. Which of course is still horrible. But I was thinking maybe he's not thinking of an entire tax in Malaysia and you're being taxed in some global that goes somewhere yet to be determined. I was going to come up with a thing he didn't say that.”
Pat quickly pointed out that in the President’s speech yesterday he seemed to clarify by describing the tax as a basic minimum tax on multinational companies, to keep companies doing business in America. And while this may sound good, it won’t work. This tax would keep multinational companies from bringing their businesses here. Who is going to willingly penalize themselves for bring a factory, jobs, products, capitol, to our country?
“Think of a company that is doing business overseas, and they are bringing in the majority of their income overseas, and they might be in a country that has a lower tax environment than here. Like any other country in the world with corporate taxes going to be a better situation for them. And now when they want to come and invest in the United States build, a new factory for local distribution, whatever. Under the system they would have to come back into the country, and pay this global minimum tax,” Stu said. “They'd have to pay taxes on income they're earning in another country. What it does is discourage companies from bringing the money here. And it's just like tax it's like a tariff. You're increasing costs of doing business in the United States. You're increasing the cost of hiring people in the United States. And we already know that the people in the United States make much more money than anybody in the world. It's hurting the economy here. It does not seem to be a concern of this President.”
