The last cheerleader

Ryan Bourne has an interesting CAPX piece on Donald Trump's decision to reject the OECD's global tax cartel.


After Trump’s OECD bombshell, the UK must slash corporate tax

• The US has rejected the OECD's global tax cartel – putting Britain in an economic bind
• OBR forecasts assumed the Treasury would gain £2.8 billion by the end of this Parliament
• Being the last cheerleader for an economically suicidal half-dead global agreement makes little sense

The effects of Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office are already being felt at His Majesty’s Treasury. On inauguration day, President Trump signed an executive order instructing his government to ‘notify the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] that any commitments made by the prior administration on behalf of the United States with respect to the Global Tax Deal have no force or effect within the United States’.

The US, in other words, is set to shatter the new OECD corporate tax agreement that’s taken a decade to thrash out. That leaves the UK, which has already integrated parts of that deal into law, in a fiscal and economic quandary.

The whole piece is well worth reading as we cannot be confident that our UK government is capable of responding pragmatically, or even responsibly. 

As things are, "Sir" Keir Starmer's government looks very much like the last cheerleader for tax cartels. Plus a few other ideas with multiple points of failure.