Biden supporting G-20 on "global taxes"

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

The G-20 meeting in Rome went largely as most of you probably expected this weekend. The event was held in a sealed-off neighborhood in the city, where U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spent most of his time scolding the rest of the world about climate change and the coming end of the world. He also complained loudly about how not enough vaccine doses are making it to Africa, accusing the United States and other developed nations of “vaccine hoarding and vaccine nationalism.”

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But there was one topic where Guterres indicated that a broad level of agreement had been reached. The entire group, including Joe Biden, was in favor of a “global corporate tax rate” for corporations. They all appeared to agree that the world’s largest job creators all need to pay a minimum 15% tax, something that Biden has been pushing for in his massive reconciliation bill back home. This must be some sort of dream-come-true for all of the globalists out there. (Associated Press)

The G-20, though, will likely be a celebration of one agreement, on a global minimum corporate tax. The G-20 leaders are expected to formally affirm their commitment to establishing a 15% global minimum corporate tax rate by 2023, a measure aimed at preventing multinational companies from stashing profits in countries where they pay few or no taxes.

The move has been praised by White House officials as a “game changer” that would create at least $60 billion in new revenue a year in the U.S. – a stream of cash that could help partially pay for a nearly $3 trillion social services and infrastructure package that President Joe Biden is seeking. U.S. adoption is key because so many multinational companies are headquartered there.

But Biden is struggling to come to agreement with members of his own party on what will be included in the massive spending plan, not to mention how it will be paid for.

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We are once again seeing one of the glaring problems with sending US presidents to these global “summits” to discuss important domestic policy matters. Joe Biden can “agree” to such a proposal all he likes, but it doesn’t mean anything. United States tax policy is set by Congress and approved by the President. No global entity dictates tax policy to us nor much of anything else for that matter.

If Biden tries to commit the United States to that sort of plan, he will, in effect, be committing us to a treaty. And that’s not a power that the President holds. It’s the same as when Barack Obama tried to lash us into the Paris Climate Accord. That too was a treaty, enacted without the will of the people being expressed through the legislature. Donald Trump wisely pulled us out of it, but Obama set a dangerous precedent with that.

I’m not saying that some sort of change to corporate tax policy in the United States is off the table. There may well be a change on the way. All corporations pay a certain amount of taxes every year, but generous provisions in the tax code allow clever corporate tax attorneys to essentially zero out the taxes that some companies pay with other deductions, leaving them owing an effective tax rate of zero.

If there’s sufficient support in Congress for some sort of “minimum corporate tax,” then that’s a debate we should have and take the appropriate actions required. But if it happens, it will happen because the elected representatives of the citizens of the United States agree to make the change. Neither Joe Biden nor any president of either party gets to make decisions like that at their own discretion. And we certainly won’t be taking our marching orders from the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, or any globalist cabal of wannabe socialist dictators.

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The next stop on the tour was the “climate summit” in Scottland. There will be more on that coming later, but you can rest assured that they’ll be trying to craft even more globalist mandates that Joe Biden will probably go along with. But the same rules apply. He’s going to have to sell it to Congress back home or it will be nothing but window dressing with no substance to it.

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