ForeignAffairsMag在2021-07-05~2021-07-11的言论
- 12: The Taxman Cometh: How a Global Minimum Tax Could End the Race to the Bottom, submitted on 2021-07-07 23:23:50+08:00.
- 13: Does America Really Support Democracy—or Just Other Rich Democracies?, submitted on 2021-07-09 22:55:54+08:00.
12: The Taxman Cometh: How a Global Minimum Tax Could End the Race to the Bottom, submitted on 2021-07-07 23:23:50+08:00.
—– 12.1 —–2021-07-07 23:27:31+08:00:
[SS from the article by Nicholas Shaxson, the author of Treasure Islands and a writer for the Tax Justice Network]
[It] was remarkable when, at the beginning of July, 130 countries representing 90 percent of global GDP agreed to a package of measures designed to move in the opposite direction. The deal, which was facilitated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), builds on a framework developed by the G-7 at its June summit. Its most important element was a global minimum corporate tax rate of “at least” 15 percent. The proposal could cut tax havens out of the picture, since it includes a provision whereby multinationals paying below the minimum rate in a given country would see their home countries top up the tax to the minimum rate and take the resulting revenue.
The deal reflects a new, pro-tax mood taking hold in Western capitals. In Washington, President Joe Biden has rolled out his American Jobs Plan, which proposes pushing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and, perhaps just as important, giving the IRS an $80 billion boost to its budget over the next decade. In London, the British government announced that its own long-running program of corporate tax cuts had failed to stimulate investment as hoped and so the rate would climb back up to 25 percent by 2023—a stunning reversal for the Conservative government.
The long-term prospects for higher taxes on multinationals have never been better.
13: Does America Really Support Democracy—or Just Other Rich Democracies?, submitted on 2021-07-09 22:55:54+08:00.
—– 13.1 —–2021-07-09 22:59:18+08:00:
[SS from the essay by Jake Werner, Postdoctoral Global China Research Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.]
This fixation on a clash between autocracy and democracy obscures a deeper divide in geopolitics: the conflict between rich and poor. The United States asserts leadership of the world’s democracies, but it actually stands opposed to most democracies on many of the most significant global issues. From the COVID-19 pandemic to global trade rules, from climate change to economic development, the United States is actively frustrating the priorities of most of the world’s democracies. In the process, U.S. foreign policy is—in the name of democracy—compounding the global crisis of democracy and delegitimizing U.S. power.
Rich and poor democracies share many problems. Forty years of increasingly concentrated wealth, deteriorating public goods, eroding stability for workers, and a disintegrating sense of collective belonging have provided raw material for nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism in democracies of all levels of wealth. The Biden administration understands this. In speech after speech, Biden has made an essential point: people are losing faith in democracy because democracy is not meeting their needs. In his domestic agenda, Biden recognizes that investing in the common good, providing greater power and security to labor, and mobilizing people to confront the climate crisis are all crucial to the project of fending off illiberal politics and reviving democracy in the United States.
Yet Biden’s foreign policy suffers from a strange disconnect. Rather than pursuing a global strategy to revive faith in the common good, Biden focuses on outcompeting China—as if people outside the United States value democracy not because it empowers them but because it is synonymous with U.S. power.
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