Federal Triangle: Mealy Mouthed Mendacity

Mealy-mouthed mendacity is a term not used without cause. So excuse my temerity as we discuss a brazen report recently issued by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) entitled "Towards Global Tax Cooperation." The 29 member OECD, composed of industrial world nations including the U.S., formed in 1961 to promote policies to achieve sustainable economic growth with rising standard of living while maintaining financial stability, sound economic expansion, and growth in multilateral world trade. No problem; but, these goals have been convoluted to make OECD a "control freak wanna-be," an instrument of the one-world government crowd, and a veiled proponent to all national governments to conspire to wring more taxes from their citizenry. The current Administration subscribes to the philosophies of this report, whose OECD representatives endorsed it, giving extra reason in our coming election to understand what the Clinton legacy is. We know how to define what this "is" is; it's TAX.

The OECD report states that governments must intensify cooperation to manage global issues; "taxation is no exception" including "spread of harmful tax competition" and "mobile activities that unfairly erode the tax base of other countries and distort the location of capital and services." The wording of the report then turns defensive stating that the "project is not primarily about collecting taxes°°not intended to promote harmonization of income taxes°°not about dictating appropriate level of tax rate" but (the key) "ensuring that tax is not a dominant factor in making capital allocation decisions." OECD will "support the effective fiscal sovereignty of countries over the design of their tax system." (The use of the word "effective" is telling.) Further, "To counter harmful preferential tax regimes°°Guidelines will eliminate the harmful features." The report wording in the discussion sections then gets squishy describing how the OECD Committee "endorsed an ap-proach to extend and take forward cooperatively the dialog with jurisdictions that meet the tax haven criteria." The United States is considered by much of the world as a tax haven.