No question of Harmonising tax rates
No honest. They want to harmonise the tax system though, which is technically something else.
Plans to create a pan-European corporate tax system are to proceed despite opposition from some European Union countries, EU Tax Commissioner Laszlo Kovacs told the Financial Times in an interview published on Friday.
The idea is to create a group of countries that wish to do this and to forge ahead, ala Euro.
Aside from the fact that this is almost certainly a step toward tax harmonisation (it is certainly a prerequisite) I have another problem with this. Imagine that the tax system is set up by a meddling greedy idiot like Gordon Brown. Badly designed, with perverse incentives, it would normally be swept away following an election, or even restructured by its original designer.
This is design by committee however, and the chances of change later on is almost impossible.
2 comments:
It is most certainly Alec Issigonis' pet hate and a quite retrograde step. They're trying every which way to shore up the continental free fall economies. Tax is only the benign face of it.
I might go for it if Corporation tax (passed on to consumers through higher prices, staff through lower wages and investors through lower ROI) was set to zero accross the whole EU.
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