Only on Fox News would an international acceptance of President Biden’s proposal for a minimum global corporate tax rate be called “a surrender.”
As The Washington Post explains, the Biden administration worked to enact this agreement, seeing it as a way to keep U.S. companies and their taxes from fleeing to lower-tax countries:
The deal reached at the G-7 meeting in London by Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. is a major breakthrough for the Biden administration’s efforts to enact a floor on the taxes paid by corporations worldwide.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been adamant that the U.S. needs to work with other countries to prevent firms seeking lower tax obligations from simply moving elsewhere. Corporate tax rates across the globe have fallen dramatically over the last four decades.
In return, the administration agreed to let other countries tax some of the overseas profits of U.S.-based companies:
Under the deal, the U.S. is expected to give up some taxing rights on overseas profits of U.S.-based tech giants.
The deal enables countries to tax 20 percent of the profits of “the largest and most profitable multinational enterprises” that have profit margins of at least 10 percent.
But the deal has to be ratified by 2/3 of the U.S. Senate – which means that the GOP-obstruction propaganda has begun. So, without going into the details of what the agreement would mean, Rep. Kevin Brady and Fox host David Asman went full-bore with demonizing rhetoric.
Asman began by “asking” viewers, “But will you be the one who ends up paying for it?”
Brady told us he is “very worried about” the tax.
Asman claimed it gives “foreigners the right to decide how much our taxes are.”
Brady took it a step further. “This is not, as the president said, a victory for America, it is a surrender,” he said. “What the president essentially did was to go to China, Japan, our other foreign competitors, and say, ‘Look, we’re raising taxes, our companies will be less competitive, we’re going to move and lose jobs, manufacturing headquarters overseas, won’t you help us?’”
Brady also claimed those nations said, “We’ll be glad to take both your jobs and your tax base, the same tax base you’ll need to fund your government in the future.”
“President Biden is turning over the sovereignty of tax policy to foreign countries,” Brady added.
“Shouldn’t we learn from what just happened in the UK?” Asman “asked.”
Brady upped the fear mongering, now suggesting Biden may be causing some kind of economic collapse:
BRADY: This is without question the biggest economic blunder in our lifetimes. The president inherited a very strong economy: life-saving vaccines, an opening economy, and we’re already seeing half a million jobs less under President Biden than we did under President Trump during the height of COVID. We’re seeing slower paychecks, we’re seeing less growth, our long term unemployment is worse than it was before the pandemic.
“We don’t need more stimulus and endless government checks,” Brady continued, “we need less Joe Biden. If we had less of his policies, frankly, our economy would be moving along much more strongly.”
FACT CHECK: President Biden inherited an economy that fell by 3.5% in 2020, then grew by 6.4% in the first quarter of his presidency. The New Yorker noted recently that “wages are rising at a level not seen in years” and that the economy generated 559,000 more jobs in May.
But Asman said, “Right” after Brady claimed no more government stimulus is needed and “Yeah,” after Brady said less Biden is needed.
There was more fear mongering as Asman warned that before long, Biden would let foreigners dictate how the U.S. spends its money.
“In effect, we already have,” Brady said. "With the Paris Accord and a number of these climate agreements, that’s exactly what we’re doing, putting our economic future in the hands of other countries.”
You can watch it below, from the June 8, 2021 Your World.
I again note that the Tax Transfer provided barely crumbs to Americans earning under 75K, massively increased the actual tax burden for Americans earning 75K to 415K and then significantly lowered the tax burden for Americans making more than 415K. A working class American earning 30K per year saw perhaps 5-10 dollars more per week before their health costs went up to eat that. Millionaire Americans saw massive gains – especially the ones enjoying the Estate Tax reduction so that they could pass along over 22 million dollars without any tax obligation.
His actual problem with the global minimum tax is that it would compel his wealthiest corporate donors to actually pay SOMETHING in taxes rather than flee to havens where they can get away with reclassifying their income into non-existence.