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The Biden administration has started an effort to introduce a minimum corporation tax level globally, which they are aiming to set at 21%. The plan also contemplates ensuring tax is paid where profit is generated, precluding the escape to more benign tax climates. These are fantastic news, although we need to be wary of the many obstacles this initiative will still face, if it is ever to become a reality. As corporate profits increase and more people struggle as a result of inequality, fair corporate taxation and a degree of social redistribution of their profits is critical to maintain a precarious social balance. From my perch, the most important aspect of this development is the recognition that tax evasion and inequality are problems that can only be addressed globally, as corporations think and function globally. Once we perceive global problems in global rather than national terms, we may even have a chance to fix them! I am definitely on Team Biden on this one Length: 982 charac...

I’ve just been through a Kafkian experience, more of the ‘The Trial’ type than the ‘The metamorphosis’ type, two books you must read, if you haven’t. Last week, the company I’ve spent the last 15 years building in Spain, exporting globally, creating high quality employment, paying significant taxes and Social Security fees and achieving a relatively high profile in local and national media, was inspected by the tax office, to ascertain whether we exist or are a shell created to make bogus VAT claims. This is a due to our VAT returns being consistently negative, as most of our revenue comes from exports. The inspector’s verdict, to our relief, is that we do exist. I had no idea how to explain to our 50 team members and their families, had the decision gone the opposite way. Of course, it couldn’t, and that is the difference between our Western reality and Kafka’s universes, created to expose the mindless stupidity bureaucracies are capable of, as just illustrated by our Taxation Ministr...

A conversation has just been related to me between a normal person (the adjective is intentional) and a Spanish policewoman. Let me set the scene. There is significant debate in Spain, relevant in essence to other countries, about the appropriateness of Spanish high earning youtubers decamping to Andorra to avoid (or evade, depending on perspective) taxation. The chat that occupies us was about a specific youtuber, who earnt 4 million euros in 2020 and would have to pay 42% income tax in Spain. The policewoman, a civil servant, was of the opinion that going to Andorra was the right thing to do. She, in his situation, would do the same, as 1.6 million is an excessive amount of tax to pay. There seems to be no connection, in her mind (I am assuming against available evidence that she must have one) between the state’s ability to pay her wages and fund her service and its ability to collect just tax proceeds. What hope do we have when even those paid by taxes encourage tax avoidance? Leng...

Donald Trump, the incumbent US President and self-proclaimed billionaire, has paid negligible federal taxes for a number of years, as revealed by a New York Times exposé this week. Many of his supporters have come out in his defence, stating it is smart to use the tools available in the fiscal system to avoid tax, so long as it is done within current legality. Trump himself has often stated this self-serving view. The problem is that having a president who shirks tax obligations is a paradox. Tax is a manifestation of civic spirit, it is one of the tools we use to build a society. The president is a civic figure, the most important one, and the chief executive of the apparatus tasked with building society. What the NY Times revelation tell us, if we did not know already, is that the person charged by Americans with building their society is antisocial, the head of their civic society has no civic spirit. His individual behaviour is incompatible with the role the collective has given hi...

The keen observer will have noticed an unexpected, amusing and somewhat shocking phenomenon in the last few days. The plan by the UK conservative party to balance the accounts after the coronavirus economic shock by taxing the rich and corporations. This policy is anathematic to the Tories, who have built their proud electoral record on the opposite, the liberalisation of capital. Their U-turn, the last of many to date and the first of many more to come, is the consequence of a startling fact. There is nowhere else to get money from, no other politically acceptable way to balance the books. The Tories have exploited the working classes to such extent that, on exiting the latest shock, they dare not, despite their fanatically ideologic penchant to do so, tax the rank and file of British society. It is akin to watching the shipwrecked turn to eating each other to survive, when all else fails. We, the no longer targeted, watch in mirthless bemusement as they fall on their neoliberal sword...

  Inequality is one of our major social challenges nowadays. The political turmoil agitating our societies today is a direct consequence of it. In fact, inequality is nothing new, humanity has lived with it for centuries, at many times graver than currently. But, alas, as we grew wealthier in the last century, there was hope that we may start to address it, that mindless accumulation of profits would be superseded by more lofty objectives and focuses from the powerful and the mighty. It is interesting, revisiting John Stuart Mill in the last few days, to note that he was already, 150 years ago, preoccupied with the same issues and also that his blueprint for solving them, and his actual expectation of the evolution of capitalism, remains relevant today. It seems that, in socio political terms, we have made little progress since the Victorians. His recipe? Higher inheritance taxation and workers cooperatives competing in a capitalist system with private enterprises. Would they work ...

The UK has 320,000 homeless people, according to latest Shelter numbers. I had to double take when I saw that statistic. This is 1 in 200. Yet another European statistic the UK leads handsomely, although of course, in this particular case that adverb could not be more misleading. It is a huge social problem, and one that only exists because the fifth richest country in the World has no will to solve it. Many of the World’s billionaires live in London, untaxed. Many corporate financial behemoths are based in London, paying little tax, if any. A small percentage of this wealth, directed to homelessness, would eradicate it, without downsides to the UK population and bringing huge improvements not only to the lives of the 320,000, but to all of us who share (or not, as the case may be) our society with them. Interestingly, I don’t think I’ve seen that number quoted anywhere in the media. Yet another silent social problem in UK, another area in which it is diverging from the rest of Europe ...