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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
Senators are chomping down hard on Apple’s tax returns, trying to paint the company as Peck’s Bad Boy of corporate taxation. The lawmakers’ appetite has been whetted by a congressional investigation showing that the company avoided billions in taxes by setting up a complex web of global subsidiaries, some of them with no employees but [...]
Second in a series of postings on the European economic and budget situation. I am grateful to Natalia Aivazova for valuable research assistance. See also A Reassuring Choice for the Central Bank of Russia. Corporate profit taxes have fallen like stones throughout Western Europe in the last three decades. At the same time, their revenues [...]
Until recently, corporate tax reform was a bipartisan priority. Commissions with a Democratic slant and a Republican slant both argued for a cut in the statutory US corporate tax rate – the highest among advanced countries – from 35 percent to the neighborhood of 25 percent.1 Congressional Republicans and President Obama’s Treasury Department agreed. But [...]
The failure to reach a budget agreement by the US Congressional "super committee" says much about the American political system. Few individuals probably have a bigger stake in this failure than the president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), Grover Norquist, whose pledge [pdf] signed by 238 members and 41 senators of the 112th Congress [...]
The proposal for a financial transaction tax by the European Union has often been described as a “Tobin Tax.” What is being discussed is a tax rate of 0.1 percent on all financial transactions with the principal objective of raising revenue. Note the emphasis, because these details have created a misleading impression. When James Tobin [...]
I am in Sweden now, and public opinion against a Tobin tax here is massive. The Swedish Social Democratic government enacted a transaction tax on stocks, bonds, options, and some other securities in 1983. The tax, named after the economist James Tobin, was abolished by the new nonsocialist government in 1991. The tax rates varied [...]
Nobody loves a tax evader. Almost twenty years ago, I wrote that the United States must take effective steps—in an age of globalization—to ensure that Americans pay their personal income taxes to Uncle Sam.1 In particular, Americans should not be able to avoid personal taxes by hiding their foreign dividends and interest from the eyes [...]
The ironies and contradictions surrounding the demand by some European governments that Ireland raise the corporate tax rate as part of a program to address its present financial predicament are breathtaking. They threaten the political underpinnings of the euro area, but also highlight a constructive role for the IMF. Let us count the ironies. First, [...]
In the wake of the Gulf oil spill, Senate Democrats are gearing up to bring an energy bill to the floor next week in the hopes of improving the safety of offshore oil production and beginning to wean the country off fossil fuels. The biggest outstanding question surrounding the draft legislation is whether it will [...]
On January 14 President Obama announced that he would ask Congress to impose a “financial crisis responsibility fee” on the 50 largest financial institutions. The fee (hereafter referred to as the tax) would be applicable to all financial institutions with more than $50 billion in consolidated assets. If it becomes law, approximately 35 US banks [...]