andrewducker | (Reply)

From:

The current progress of the EU minimum corporation tax accord is one of the biggest positives of Brexit.

The UK always, always, always blocked and undermined this policy initiative, to the extent that other countries - especially smaller countries who found it difficult to resist external pressures to become tax havens and accept the inevitable slide into money laundering and corruption - felt unable to even raise the issue when genuinely reforming parties won elections and came to the EU table as governments.

Brexit happened, and now we're out.

Although 'we', for me personally as a Citizen of the Republic of Ireland, means that my government is caught in the small-country trap of hosting extremely dangerous and corrupting parasites, while being fiscally-dependent on large companies 'onshoring' EU-wide profits into our competitive low-tax regime.

That's now over.

Also... Read this paragraph from the BBC again, it is an absolute work of art:

Even this week, Poland blocked the formal adoption of the measure while arguing about unrelated policies, such as sanctions on Russia.

There are no redundant words in it, at all, and every clause has been crafted so as to be both true and untrue, in a horribly illuminating way.

This has repurcussions outside the EU, and the Biden administration being onside with this is a reassuring sign of the return to internationalism in Washington politics and policy.

It remains to be seen whether the ugly realities of America's dysfunctional legislative politics will now permit effective laws to be passed in both houses.

Nevertheless, a legislative victory in Washington is at least possible, before their election cycle dumps billions of dollars of corporate funding into negative campaigning that makes it impossible for their elected politicians to be a force for good in the World.

Let's be clear about this: coordinated US and EU legislative efforts and tax reform really will make a difference in the World.

Big tech companies - Amazon especially - will start paying taxes in full, and smaller companies everywhere will no longer be competing against rivals whose prices and access to capital reflect the fact that trading untaxed beats-out best practices in business.

And the corrupting influence of hosting cross-border tax avoidance will no longer weigh down smaller countries: I suspect that this will have effects far beyond continental Europe.