Hungary vetoes EU adoption of global corporate minimum tax pushed by Biden

[libertybele]

Hungary vetoes EU adoption of global corporate minimum tax pushed by Biden

Hungary has thrown cold water on the European Union’s plan to adopt a 15% corporate minimum tax, dealing a blow to EU leadership and the Biden administration.

The plan is part of a broader push for a global minimum tax, which has support from President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. The proposal was agreed to last October by nearly 140 countries, although implementation requires each country, or bloc of countries in the case of the EU, to codify it individually.

Hungary said it is not ready to move forward with the plan on Friday. Because the EU requires unanimity among all member countries to change EU tax policy, Hungary’s veto effectively blocks the measure from moving forward.

“The work is not ready,” said Hungarian Finance Minister Mihaly Varga, according to Reuters. “I think we have to continue the effort to find a solution.”

Poland had also expressed opposition to the 15% minimum tax, but Warsaw later changed its mind and said it would support the plan after the European Commission agreed on a conditional basis to pay out nearly $38 billion in pandemic recovery grants and loans.

Some officials have said Poland held back its vote in order to have the leverage to secure the funds. Yellen even flew to Warsaw in May to help push the Polish government to accept the deal.

Now Hungary might be taking a page out of Poland’s playbook, although it claims to be vetoing the proposal out of economic concerns.

“We always mean what we say: Amidst a raging war that is already straining and probing Europe’s economy and the effects of the sanction policies, introducing [the tax rate] would seriously harm EU’s competitiveness,” Zoltan Kovacs, Hungary’s secretary of state for international communication and relations, told Politico.

Stateside, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) praised Hungary’s move to reject the plan. Toomey, who is the ranking member on the Banking Committee, has been an outspoken critic of a global minimum tax and argued that the notion is because the Biden administration wants to justify raising corporate taxes. .......................

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/economy/hungary-vetoes-eu-corporate-minimum-tax

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Good.  If I had to live somewhere else, Hungary seems my type of spot.

Unlike the US, it has experienced the horrors of Communism first hand and no way wish to return there

[PeteS in CA]

One of the dirty little secrets of punitive regs and taxes is that established large companies can bear them more readily than can small and start-up companies. So a result of such measures is that smaller competition is stifled, and innovative start-ups are aborted, i.e killed before being birthed.

[Kamaji]

One of the dirty little secrets of punitive regs and taxes is that established large companies can bear them more readily than can small and start-up companies. So a result of such measures is that smaller competition is stifled, and innovative start-ups are aborted, i.e killed before being birthed.

That is always the case, and is why big business oftentimes only appears to oppose more regulation; so long as new regulations will kill off their startup competitors, big business is fine with more government regulation.

[GtHawk]

A global corporate tax? Of course Biden and the other communists would be for that, because it will be the people who pay, not the  corporations.