It seemed puzzling when President Joe Biden announced last week, through his press spokeswoman, that in his latest negotiations with Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito over “infrastructure” legislation, he had shifted to proposing a “15% minimum corporate tax.” This was after campaigning and pushing for the past year for an increase from the current 21%, where the GOP put it in the 2018 tax cut, to 25%. But then Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen returned from the G7 Finance Ministers’ meeting crowing that the G7 had agreed on a “global minimum corporate tax rate” of 15%. The global average of official corporate tax rates, which was 40% forty years ago, was still 23% when Biden took office. The G7 agreement on 15% minimum is rather openly being credited to the Biden Administration, which is praising itself for it. The nations with corporate taxes this low or lower are mostly in Eastern Europe (including Russia) and a scattering in Northern Europe “led” by Ireland.
Just as in previous periods of American history when anti-trust legislation was needed, the global corporate tax issue is largely a matter of the monopolists of today, the tech giants, the Big Pharma firms, etc.
So we can look immediately at the reaction of Facebook to this new minimum tax. It was delivered by the same Sir Nicholas Clegg who was delightedly announcing the two-year speech ban on Donald Trump a few days ago. Sir Nick said: “Facebook has long called for reform of the global tax rules and we welcome the important progress made at the G7. Today’s agreement is a significant first step for certainty for businesses, and strengthening public confidence in the global tax system.” And from Google spokesman José Castañeda: “We strongly support the work being done to update international rules. We hope countries continue to work together to ensure a balanced and durable agreement will be finalized soon.”
There is another factor to be taken into account. Some 64 different carbon pricing instruments (effectively, carbon taxes) generated $153 billion in 2020-21, up 17% from 2019-20 despite clearly much reduced economic activity on which they were feeding. This is according to a release by the World Bank, which said one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions were now taxed, but nonetheless protested: “But the potential of carbon pricing is still largely untapped, despite the fact that it can be effective in driving decarbonization for countries in all stages of development.”
If the biggest corporations will keep paying less, the Great Reset intends rising carbon taxes and/or rising mandated “prices” of CO2 per ton, to loot both households and small businesses and pay for the great leap backward of the Green New Deal.
The antidotes are tough ones: restoring Glass-Steagall to break the Wall Street banks up, nationalizing the Federal Reserve – and, if necessary to back up other credit institutions like the ExIm Bank, etc., then using tax policy to break up corporate trusts as well.
