En Passant

If the UK Public Accounts Committee can question Starbucks, Amazon and Google about their tax affairs, and then condemn them for not paying any tax in Britain, we can do it here in Australia.

A thoroughgoing investigation into the tax affairs of big business is needed to see just what they get up to and whether they are paying a fair share of tax in Australia. After all, what has big business got to hide? Over to you Senators Rhiannon and Cameron.

Without a mass working class movement demanding and winning better wages, more jobs and price controls as well as more tax paid by the rich and big business, the rich and big business will continue to get richer and pay less and less tax.

It might well be a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day, but on the very day I had an article in The Conversation called Giant profits, tiny tax bills: time to close loopholes on corporate tax avoidance dealing with multinationals like Google et al and the inadequacies and problems with 20th century [...]

Such is Labor’s degeneration they have handed the tax collecting role to a person whose whole working life has been representing the interests of big business in general in policy debates and discussions and defending specific big businesses when battling the ATO. Jordan would almost certainly be someone who has undertaken tax planning for his big business clients and the rich. One has to wonder if he has been involved in tax avoidance schemes. Neoliberal madness.

Tax Office staff are in shock over the Labor Government’s axing of the Commissioner of Taxation, Michael D’Ascenzo. More shocks are in store. What better way to gut the Tax Office than for business to appoint one of their own to lead it? Is there an alternative? Yes. Tax the rich and give the ATO enough funding for it to do its job as the collector of tax rather than the handmaiden of business. Make the rich pay. That is something Labor won’t do.

The Treasurer has today been telling us the Minerals Resource Rent Tax is working precisely as it should – not raising any tax. The hospital in Yes Minister worked perfectly too – it didn’t have any patients.

There are 2 important aspects of tax havens – low or no tax and bank secrecy. Henry is about less imposition by the state on the other hostile brothers and in keeping the accumulation process which creates surplus value ticking over and running smoothly it has to reduce its taxes on capital to do so. This is the logic of tax competition – and tax havens are its ultimate expression.

Between $21 and $32 trillion – as much as Japan and America’s GDPs combined – has been stashed in offshore tax havens by the world’s richest 10 million individuals. Just 92,000 of them claim a $9.8 trillion dollar share.

Taxing foreign residents on their currently exempt capital gains will have little or no impact on foreign investment given that the gains are supposedly taxed in comparable tax jurisdictions. It will however bring revenue onshore that is currently going into the coffers of, for example, the US and European Treasuries, or being hidden in places like the Cayman Islands.

So here we have a Government and Opposition intending to attack the poor and ordinary workers to save a few billion when a few simple tax measures – like taxing the family homes of the rich, and abolishing the superannuation tax lurks for the millionaires, and getting rid of the tax concessions for capital gains – would raise tens of billions.