Tax competition: Picking each others' pockets
The Guardian today points out something that we have long said about an ideology that almost nobody in the mainstream media thought to question until now.
"In defiance of all economic logic, George Bush's advisers said tax competition was beneficial in just the same way as competition in general - deliberately conflating the real gains that arise when things are produced more efficiently with the subzero-sum game that results when exchequers pick each other's pockets."
Since early 2007 we have had a whole section of our website dedicated to this theme. International co-operation is key to any solution, and we did see some of this yesterday, albeit not nearly enough.
The rest of the Guardian editorial is worth reading too.
"In defiance of all economic logic, George Bush's advisers said tax competition was beneficial in just the same way as competition in general - deliberately conflating the real gains that arise when things are produced more efficiently with the subzero-sum game that results when exchequers pick each other's pockets."
Since early 2007 we have had a whole section of our website dedicated to this theme. International co-operation is key to any solution, and we did see some of this yesterday, albeit not nearly enough.
The rest of the Guardian editorial is worth reading too.
posted by TJN at 2:53 am
1 Comments:
The Guardian article referred to says this...
Although written off as a sideshow by the right, the parasitical paradises in which the rich stuff their gold are at the heart of what has gone wrong. The Guardian's Tax Gap series this year established that a major motivation for metamorphosing old-fashioned mortgages into new-fangled securities was the desire to get money offshore. Bundled up in the complex debt parcels lurked the venom which has poisoned the banks. There are also broader connections with the state we are in. Havens were tolerated by an ideology which put private wealth ahead of public good.
Which begs many questions. Where and how do the rich get their gold in the first place? And how did all the dodgy mortgages come about? Why were the banks lending money that to people that could not pay it back, on the security of real estate whose value had been pumped up to artificially high levels by excessively free lending? And why were people so willing or anxious to stretch themselves to get on the property ladder? What is really going on here?
The tax haven problem is well downstream of the source.
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