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本帖最后由 tuziduidui 于 2009-5-31 11:49 编辑
Background reading
The rich under attack
Taxing the rich
More or less equal?
Tax haven hypocrisy
The rise and fall of the wealthy
The rich under attack
Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition
Going for the bankers is tempting for politicians—and dangerous for everybody else
STONES thrown through a banker’s windows in Edinburgh, workers“bossnapping” executives in France, retrospective 90% tax ratesproposed in Washington, and now a riot in London as G20 leaders arrived for their summit (see article). A sea change in social attitudes that could have profound effects on politics and the world economy is under way.
The rich are certainly not the only targets in the current populistbacklash. Frightened by the downturn, people are furious with politicians, central bankers and immigrants. But a rising wave of angeris directed against the new “malefactors of great wealth”. Today’s villains are a larger and more global bunch than the handful of American robber barons Teddy Roosevelt denounced a century ago; and most of them are bankers and fund managers, rather than owners of trusts and railroads. Yet the themes are similar to those at the end of that previous gilded age: rising inequality—the top 0.1% of Americans earned 20 times the income of the bottom 90% in 1979 and 77 times in2006—and a sense that the greedy rich have cheated decent working people of their rightful share of the pie.
Some of this cheating has been of an old familiar sort: building Ponzi schemes and bribing politicians to secure favourable deals. There are greyer areas, in which the rich hide their cash in tax havens and get tax law written to their advantage—witness the indefensible treatment of private-equity profits. But what makes the rich’s behaviour so galling for many critics is that their two greatest crimes were committed in broad daylight, as they were part of the system itself.
The two great cheats The first charge is that the rich created a new form of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose capitalism. Traders and fund managers got huge rewards for speculating with other people’s money, but when they failed the parent company, the client and ultimately the taxpayer had to pay the bill. Monetary policy contributed to this asymmetry of risk:when markets faltered central banks usually rescued them by cutting interest rates.
The second charge is that the bankers and fund managers were not doing anything useful. Unlike the “deserving” rich entrepreneurs who set up Microsoft and Google, the “undeserving” traders and brokers just shuffled money around the system to nobody’s profit but their own. The faster the money went round, the larger the financial sector loomed in the rich countries’ economies. At its peak it contributed 41% of domestic American corporate profits, more than double the rate two decades ago. As finance grew, the banks got ever bigger—too big to fail, eventually, so when they tottered taxpayers had to prop them up.Far from epitomising capitalism, the undeserving rich undermined it: it was socialism for the wealthy.
These two charges run together, but the second has much less justification. Enormous though the cost of bailing out the banks has been, there is nothing inherently undeserving about finance; even in their flawed state, more liquid markets have brought huge benefits to the rest of the economy. The lower cost of capital has made it easier for industry to invest, innovate and protect itself against interest and exchange-rate risk. Trying to single out financiers from entrepreneurs is a fool’s errand: you will end up hurting both.
The heads-I-win charge is not entirely proven, either: some of the people who ran banks did lose when they went bust. Yet even a newspaper as inherently pro-business as this one has to admit that there was something rotten in finance: the basic capitalist bargain, under which genuine risk takers are allowed to garner huge rewards, seems a poor one if taxpayers are landed with a huge bill for it all. Hence the anger.
A time for correction and brown paper bags Periods of excess, when inequality has grown, tend to be followed by eras of reform: Roosevelt bust the trusts and shortly afterwards Congress moved towards introducing a federal income tax. Part of the genius of capitalism is its ability to adjust to disruption from within and attacks from without.
Indeed, the system is already beginning to correct itself. As our special reportthis week points out, the rich are not as rich as they were: some $10trillion, around a quarter of the wealthy’s assets, has been lost.Inequality will decline. Investment banks and hedge funds are shrinking; private-equity groups are struggling to finance takeovers.Having discovered how volatile markets can be, banks will be less keen on trading in the future. There is even a correction going on inconspicuous consumption: Net-a-porter, a pricey website, offers to deliver designer outfits to its customers in brown paper bags.
The market’s self-correction will not be enough, however. Higher taxes will eventually be inevitable, since so many governments have lurched heavily into deficit. But politicians must tread carefully. Tax rises right away would be a rotten idea, since for the moment fiscal stimulus is needed. And even when governments raise the money, they should first get rid of deductions and reverse unmeritocratic measures(such as George Bush’s repeal of America’s death tax) rather than jacking up income-tax rates to punitive levels. Squeeze the rich until the pips squeak, and the juice goes out of the economy.
As for heads-I-win capitalism, the problem of asymmetric risk should shrink, because the rule changes needed to make the financial system safer will also remove unwarranted profits. Contra-cyclical capital requirements, forcing banks to build more reserves during good times,will leave them less cash to splurge on bonuses. Many of the sweetest sources of profit sprang up in the cracks between regulatory systems;governments are now filling in these gaps. If central banks focus on asset markets when they rise as well as when they fall, they will remove much of the froth. Treat a bank that becomes too big to fail like a utility, and it will make less money.
Curbing the excesses of wealth, then, will be a side effect of regulations designed to make capitalism work better. Such measures willnot provide the lyrics to revolutionary anthems, but they are going to be better than going after the wealthy. The rich are an easy target.But when you try to bash them, you usually end up punching yourself in the nose.
A special report on the rich
Plucking the chickens
Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition
But taxes have their limits
THE rich are paying more tax; the rich aren’t paying enough.Depending on which statistics you use, you can make a convincing caseeither way.
America’s Internal Revenue Service publishes figures showing theproportion of income-tax receipts paid by different segments of thepopulation. Back in 1986 the top 1% of taxpayers were responsible for25.4% of all income tax paid; by 2005 their share had risen to 38.4%.The IRS also has figures for the top 400 American taxpayers. In 2006their incomes averaged more than $263m, compared with $214m the yearbefore. On those incomes they paid tax at an average rate of just17.2%, well down from a peak of 29.9% in 1995; 31 of those 400 paidless than 10% in tax.
These figures are two sides of the same coin. The rich are paying alot more tax in nominal terms because, as this special report hasdemonstrated, they have got a lot richer. But the rates of tax they payhave come down. Those on the political right can cite this as evidencethat lower tax rates eventually increase tax receipts; those on the left, that the rich have been getting away with lower taxes at a timewhen median incomes have stagnated.
Governments around the world would like a bigger share of the pie as they seek to narrow deficits and placate angry electorates. One route they have been pursuing is to crack down on tax havens, those boltholes for the world’s wealthy. Estimates of the amount held offshore rangefrom $5 trillion to $7 trillion, so there is a strong incentive for governments to bring this money home.
In 2000 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development identified over 40 tax havens; it has since persuaded 35 of them to commit themselves to a set of standards on transparency and information exchange. According to the OECD, some 49 agreements to exchange tax information have been signed since 2000 between countries ranging from Antigua to Sweden.
Countries that will not co-operate are named and shamed. Seven jurisdictions originally refused to make the commitment and were place don a list of unco-operative tax havens; the blacklist has since shrunk to just three, Andorra, Liechtenstein and Monaco. In March Andorra and Liechtenstein pledged to weaken their secrecy laws. Switzerland,Austria and Luxembourg offerd to share information on savers with other governments on a case-by-case basis.
Individual countries are also taking action. In February UBS agreed to pay a $780m penalty to the American government and to disclose the names of some 250 customers to avoid prosecution over having helped wealthy Americans avoid taxes. The American authorities promptly demanded that the Swiss bank hand over the names of a further 52,000customers, which would require the bank to break Swiss law. (The Swisshave long made a distinction between tax evasion—not too serious—and tax fraud.) John Whiting of Pricewaterhouse Coopers in London says the British authorities have been trying to get information about their own offshore-account holders in a number of ways, including tapping the databases of high-street banks.
The German government used whistle blower laws to target citizens who had banked in Liechtenstein; some 900 suspects were pursued, including a former chief executive of Deutsche Post. The tiny principality wasoutraged, but its government fell in February and the new primeminister, Klaus Tschütscher, pledged to work with other countries and to get his country off the “unco-operative” list. A European Union meeting in Berlin in late February called for sanctions against states that do not play ball.
Countries such as Liechtenstein and Monaco are historical accidents,places that might easily have been tidied up by Napoleon or by the Treaty of Versailles after the first world war. They exist on the sufferance of larger states on whom they depend for defence and for transport links. But the EU finds it harder to put pressure on faraway countries.
Even so, with America and the EU both weighing in, there is some doubt about the long-term future of bank-secrecy laws. “The combination of whistle blower legislation and a lot of upset ex-employees in the financial-services industry may mean that in two or three years’ time there will be no such thing as a secret account,” says DavidLesperance, a tax adviser. “Already, if you own any US securities, any bank you want to deal with is obliged to report the fact to the US authorities.”
Philip Marcovici of the Zurich office of Baker & McKenzie, a law firm, says wealthy people can now do one of two things; play by therules of their home country or get out. Staying in their country and breaking the law by hiding assets and income is not an option.
Want to know a secret?But Mr Marcovici thinks governments are not approaching the issue of undisclosed income strategically. “They attack banks and jurisdiction sand that forces them to get defensive. If they admit the problem, that will get them into legal trouble. Banks need to be part of the solution, and scaring wealth-owners into trying to hide the money better and farther is not in anyone’s interest.”
Banks may react by blaming a particular employee for aiding tax evaders when the problem is in fact endemic. Clients are free to leave Liechtenstein and move their money somewhere that is less susceptible to pressure from the European authorities.
One way of trying to deal with the problem of offshore tax evasion is a withholding tax that enables countries to deduct tax automatically and leave it up to the taxpayer to reclaim the money if he can. But this may not work. The EU savings directive, for example, says a withholding tax must be imposed on interest paid to an individual resident of an EU country or through a bank in the EU or an affiliatedcountry. But it is easy to avoid the tax by turning the payment into something other than interest (such as capital gain), set up a company to receive it or have it made through a non-EU bank.
Such loopholes are common. One big controversy in recent years has been the tax treatment of “carried interest” in private-equity funds.This interest gives the fund managers the right to participate in future profits without putting up capital; in effect, it is a performance fee. In both America and Britain it has been taxed as a capital gain rather than as income, substantially lowering the managers’ tax bill. As one private-equity manager admitted, “any commonsense person would say that a highly paid private-equity executive paying less tax than a cleaning lady or other low-paid workers can’t be right.”
Another issue is the status of wealthy foreigners who usually enjoy tax privileges denied to domestic citizens. Voters in the Swiss canton that includes Zurich voted in February to end the practice of offering flat-rate deals for foreigners who choose to live in the area (the vote covered cantonal but not federal taxes). In Britain the political parties got into a brief bidding war over plans to tax the so-called“non-doms”, people deemed to be resident in Britain but not domiciled for tax purposes. The idea was to impose a flat fee in return for ignoring their offshore earnings; previously foreigners were taxed only on such money as they brought into the country.
Soak the rich…The British authorities are generally agreed to have made a mess of the proposals. According to Caroline Garnham of Lawrence Graham, a law firm, the big problem with the legislation was that the fee proposal was accompanied by 70 pages of anti-avoidance legislation. “Wealthy people don’t want an investigation into their affairs by the British authorities because they don’t know where the information will end up,”she says. The predicted mass exodus of foreigners has not materialised so far, but then the new rules are only just about to kick in. MsGarnham explains that “people haven’t gone yet because they haven’t had to file tax returns.”
It is a sign of the political times that countries such as Switzerland and Britain, long seen as havens for the wealthy, are changing the rules. As the recession bites, voters are likely to become increasingly resentful towards those enjoying a free ride at the expense of other taxpayers.
In the long term it may not be politically sustainable to discriminate against the natives by giving special tax deals to foreigners. In Hong Kong and Singapore it makes no difference whether you are a foreigner or a local: you pay tax only on income from domestic sources. Those two countries may be the tax havens of the future.
Illustration by Alex Nabaun
But the tide is not running all one way. Just as some jurisdictions try to close tax loopholes, others will keep them open. In Sweden the authorities dropped a wealth tax in 2007 in part because some rich Swedes had been moving to London. Taiwan agreed to cut its inheritance tax from a maximum of 50% to 10% in part because the wealthy had been moving money to Singapore and Hong Kong. In the Caribbean, St Kitts& Nevis offers citizenship in return for a property purchase of$350,000 plus government fees; citizens are able to enjoy foreign income, capital gains, gifts, wealth and inheritance free of tax.
What makes this tax competition even more acute is the mobility of money in a globalized world. Most developed countries abolished capital controls long ago. The very narrowness of the tax base, as illustrated by the numbers showing how much the top 1% contribute in America,highlights the danger of driving such people away.
In addition, political parties in many countries depend on wealthy individuals. Politicians have had to tread carefully for fear of giving of fence to their paymasters.
Such pressures led to cuts in personal income-tax rates between 2002and 2008 in 33 out of 87 countries surveyed by KPMG International, afirm of accountants, whereas only seven saw increases. The top rate fell from an average of 31.3% to 28.8%.
…but not too much In Britain the Labour government has abandoned its long-standing pledge not to raise the top rate of income tax and imposed a 45% levy on those earning more than £150,000 a year. In America President Obama’s first budget proposals included an increase in capital-gains tax and a rise in the highest rate of income tax back to levels last seen in the Clinton era. That trend is now likely to be reversed.
It seems unlikely that developed countries will ever go back to the income-tax rates of 90% or more seen in the 1970s, but some of the higher taxes recently introduced will surely stick, for three main reasons. First, most countries face big budget deficits, which makes it tempting to raise taxes to help fill the hole. Governments that ask middle- and working-class voters to shoulder the whole of the burden may quickly lose office.
Second, although in theory it is possible to move between countries to avoid tax, there are lots of practical difficulties. Family ties,business requirements and personal preferences are likely to persuade many people to pay somewhat higher taxes rather than uproot their lives. The recent crackdown on tax havens may also deter many investors from moving their capital.
Third, there is the issue of security. The British government pointedly failed to help account holders with the Guernsey branch of Landsbanki, a failed Icelandic bank. The Channel island, long seen as a tax haven for British investors, does not have a deposit-protection scheme.
“The tax authorities are trying to make it steadily more difficult to avoid tax,” says Mr Whiting. The effect is to push evaders to the fringes of the system, where they may be more at threat from fraudsters than from the taxman. Rich people may feel it is better to pay some of their money in tax than to risk losing it all in a jurisdiction with lax rules. |
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发表于 2009-5-31 11:01:54
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