Maybe Obama should consider a tax amnesty? Get money in from outside the US at a low tax rate (something is better than nothing right) and get it circulating in the US creating jobs and funding startups/ideas
Tax amnesties just encourage future tax evasion, since everyone will always be waiting for another amnesty. They create a moral hazard by causing disrespect for the rule of law.
That's only the case if everything else remains the same. A tax amnesty coupled with significantly harsher penalties for future evasion would probably work pretty well.
or the government finds a way to finance itself in a way that doesn't exclude itself from economic activity
just a thought, worked 100 years ago from before it started financing itself with a passive income tax
it is entirely possible, also consider that no form of better tax compliance would solve its budget problems. The idea of paying 'fair share' is disingenuous when it is funding embezzlement within the military and defense sector waaaaay before it funds an an oft cited road or school
the biggest irony here is that I'm not a tax protester. maybe closer to a historian.
Of of course. The government should run itself as a business. Just shut down other businesses that are profitable, and take over their market. That worked in the past right.
And the lower taxes should encourage business growth, even despite the fact that the government could come in and take over at anytime.
I don't know why this is downvoted, it's correct. They used to have tax holidays regularly in Ancient Rome, and it caused people to learn to wait for the next tax holiday.
An amnesty for cash repatriation is what Trump is currently shilling as part of his job creation platform since corps like Apple have billions overseas https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-22/tim-cook-... and are pressured by shareholders to not return it to the US where it will be taxed. Tim Cook will have to pay out 70 billion lump sum to the feds on that overseas pile of money.
Obama was also working on an amnesty for years and it never happened for whatever reasons. Of course this would work once then build up again overseas as they would just wait for another amnesty as explained by other posters.
Why should the biggest villains get amnesty when small time crooks get sentenced for life? I would rather prefer if the ones doing the worst crimes resulting in millions of people dying because of poverty get also sentenced for life.
>repatriating money from tax havens and using it to solve national problems, including poverty
There is little evidence that this will actually occur, otherwise places like Panama would be utopian paradises from all of the foreign cash. You can't solve "national problems, including poverty," if you refuse to tax the incoming money and instead let it continue to sit in corporate coffers.