Dr. Andrew P. Morriss of the University of Alabama and Lotta Moberg of George Mason University have produced a new paper titled, ““Cartelizing Taxes: Understanding the OECD’s Campaign Against ‘Harmful Tax Competition’,” which thoroughly documents the OECD’s anti-tax competition campaign. The paper echoes years of CF&P work in its description of an organization that has been hijacked and deliberately transformed into the tool of pro-tax bureaucrats which we see today, which is why we highlighted its publication in a press release yesterday.
For instance, the study describes the how the OECD’s Harmful Tax Competition paper amounts to “naked assertions of self-interest, as revealed by its clever definition of ‘harmful tax competition’ to exclude the behavior of OECD members.” Hypocrisy has been a criticism which I and our allies have repeatedly leveled at the Paris-based bureaucracy. Because high-tax politicians could not stand to admit the consequences of their bad policies choices, they have embarked on what the paper describes as an effort to “delegitimize the low tax jurisdictions’ policy choices through the creation of a “standard” that they failed to meet.” Simply put, fiscal sovereignty is only to be respected when nations make the right choices in the minds of international tax bureaucrats.
This mission creep is especially concerning because it represents movement toward policies not in America’s interest. In accordance with our own call for low-tax jurisdictions to stop cooperating with the OECD, the Morriss and Moberg paper concludes with a warning of “more efforts to harmonize previously national policies on a global scale, through recommendations, blacklists and sanctions.” This is why CF&P is organizing domestic opposition, through the Coalition for Tax Competition, to the OECD’s $100 million US taxpayer subsidy. It’s bad enough for the OECD to be engaging in this sort of behavior, but it is a complete outrage for the US to continue funding it.
