Obama and the Coming World Tax Organization

At least when government metastasizes out of control in liberal states like California, people can escape bankruptcy by leaving for freer states that won’t crush them with taxes. This gets harder when grotesquely excessive government is imposed at the federal level. It will get harder still if Comrade Obama and his coconspirators at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are successful at inflicting taxes at a global level:

OECD wants to impose global tax rules that would prevent taxpayers from ever having the ability to benefit from better tax law in other jurisdictions. … Bolstered by support from the Obama Administration, the OECD now is taking its campaign to the next level. At its Global Tax Forum in Bermuda … the bureaucrats unveiled a new scheme that effectively would result in the creation of something akin to a World Tax Organization.

Just a few of the downsides:

1. Higher tax burdens. If high-tax governments succeed is imposing this Multilateral Convention (insert “World Tax Organization” whenever you see that term), tax competition will be undermined and politicians will respond by increasing tax burdens. This is why nations such as France have been pushing this scheme, of course, and why left-wing academics have long dreamed of this type of arrangement.

2. Risk to human rights. Amazingly, the Multilateral Convention is open to repressive regimes, which then would have access to all sorts of sensitive and confidential taxpayer information. Already, the thuggish dictatorship of Azerbaijan has signed up, as well as the unstable nation of Moldova and the corrupt government of Mexico. The implications are grim, including the sale of private data to criminal gangs, the loss of sensitive information to hackers, and the direct misuse of American tax returns.

3. Loss of sovereignty. For all intents and purposes, the Multilateral Convention outlaws certain pro-growth tax policies and discourages others. Equally worrisome, it creates a system allowing foreign tax collectors to cross borders. The Obama Administration has specifically acquiesced to this provision, so perhaps we will soon see corrupt Mexican tax authorities harassing businesses and individuals on American soil.

4. Outlawing tax avoidance. The OECD historically has tried to portray its efforts as a fight against tax evasion, but the Multilateral Convention explicitly talks about “combating tax avoidance.” This should not be a surprise since the Capital Export Neutrality ideology is based on the notion that taxpayers should have zero ability to lower their tax burdens. This means we can fully expect an assault on all forms of tax planning, with American companies almost sure to be among the first to be in the OECD’s crosshairs.

Then our rulers deliver this kick in the teeth:

American taxpayers are the biggest funders of the OECD, providing nearly one-fourth of the bureaucracy’s bloated budget. So our tax dollars are being used by OECD bureaucrats (who receive tax-free salaries!) to dream up new ways of increasing our tax burdens.

It would be nice to have leadership that would defend American interests, rather than selling us out to a global socialist power structure. But the resplendent Barack Hussein Obama isn’t so parochial as to be just the president of the USA. In the words of Evan Thomas of Newsweek, one of the establishment media apparatchiks who helped him to power,

“Obama’s standing above the country, above — above the world, he’s sort of God.”

There could be no higher god, from a liberal point of view, than a global socialist dictator with the power to tax to death anyone who tries to achieve anything anywhere.