Tag Archives: Corporate taxation

Climate Science Special Report (and Tax Policy)

From About this Report:

[T]he U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) oversaw the production of this stand-alone report of the state of science relating to climate change and its physical impacts. …

The USGCRP is made up of 13 Federal departments and agencies that carry out research and support the Nation’s response to global change. The USGCRP is overseen by the Subcommittee on Global Change Research (SGCR) of the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability (CENRS), which in turn is overseen by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The agencies within USGCRP are the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce (NOAA), the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Interior, the Department of State, the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

From the Executive Summary:

… it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence. …

The magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades will depend primarily on the amount of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) emitted globally. Without major reductions in emissions, the increase in annual average global temperature relative to preindustrial times could reach 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century. With significant reductions in emissions, the increase in annual average global temperature could be limited to 3.6°F (2°C) or less.

In the New York Times, Lisa Friedman and Glenn Thrush write that the report contradicts positions of the Trump administration on climate change.

While there were pockets of resistance to the report in the Trump administration, according to climate scientists involved in drafting the report, there was little appetite for a knockdown fight over climate change among Mr. Trump’s top advisers …

The White House put out a statement Friday that seemed to undercut the high level of confidence of the report’s findings. …

Responsibility for approving the report fell to Gary D. Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, who generally believes in the validity of climate science and thought the issue would have been a distraction from the tax push, according to an administration official with knowledge of the situation.

Mankiw on the Congressional Tax Plan

In the New York Times, Greg Mankiw applauds the tax reform plan discussed in Congress. He emphasizes four points:

  • The reform would move the US tax system toward international norms, from worldwide to territorial taxation.
  • It would move the system from income towards less distorting consumption taxation, by allowing businesses to deduct investment spending immediately.
  • The reform would change the origin-based into a destination-based system (taxing imports and exempting exports, a.k.a. “border adjustment”), with similarities to a value-added tax, making it harder to game the system. “[T]he immediate impact of the change would be to discourage imports and encourage exports. … the dollar would appreciate … The movement in the exchange rate would offset the initial impact on imports and exports.”
  • The reform would abolish tax deductions for interest payments to bondholders, eliminating incentives for corporate leverage. “A business’s taxes would be based on its cash flow: revenue minus wage payments and investment spending. How this cash flow is then paid out to equity and debt holders would be irrelevant.”

Corporate Taxes: Difficult International Coordination

The Economist discusses proposals for improved consistency of international company taxation with the aim to counter firms’ “profit shifting.” Harmonization does not seem to constitute a Nash equilibrium. Tax rates on “patent boxes” typically are much lower than the headline rates.

Corporate Taxation, Profit Shifting and Cross-Border Tax Avoidance and Evasion

Matthew Klein discusses corporate and personal income tax evasion and avoidance in the FT (part 1, part 2), with reference to a JEP article by Gabriel Zucman. Klein makes several points:

  • Profit taxes were introduced as complements to income taxes, in order to make it more difficult to evade taxes by routing profits through fabricated corporate structures rather than distributing them. To avoid double taxation, capital gains and dividends typically are taxed at lower rates than labor income.
  • Whether corporate taxation should be coordinated internationally is not a new question. The League of Nations already debated it. The issue regained importance as international trade and cross-border profit flows rose.
  • Today, a third of US corporate profits are generated outside of the US. Of those, more than half are generated in Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland and the Carribean. Both shares have increased over recent decades (see the figure below which is taken from Zucman’s article). This might have contributed towards lowering the effective corporate tax rate of US corporations in the US.
    Zucman-tax-haven-share-of-foreign-profits-590x437
  • If the objective is to (i) avoid double taxation and (ii) render cross-border profit shifting irrelevant, an easy way forward could be to credit a corporation’s taxes paid worldwide against the personal income taxes owed by the corporations shareholders. This would imply that higher corporate taxes abroad could lead to lower domestic income tax revenue, a difficult political sell. It would also imply that unrealised capital gains may go untaxed.
  • Based on discrepancies between national balance of payments statistics, Zucman estimates that 8% of global household financial wealth is not reported to tax authorities (see the table below which is taken from Zucman’s article).
    Zucman-offshore-wealth-propensity-590x432
  • He proposes to impose high tariffs on exports originating from “tax havens” to force these countries to exchange information about bank accounts and, in the medium term, to create an “international financial registry.”