Tax Systems Quotes

We have two tax systems in America—separate and unequal.

There's a lot of thought that bitcoin will be a huge threat to existing tax systems or existing ways governments have of controlling currency flows across their border. I personally think governments will do what governments have always done: they will adapt.

I find it remarkable that virtually all of the large difference in labor supply between France and the United States is due to differences in tax systems. I expected institutional constraints on the operation of labor markets and the nature of the unemployment benefit system to be more important. I was surprised that the welfare gain from reducing the intratemporal tax wedge is so large.

There is no doubt that as an economy grows in a great way like India has, that you have to step back and change your tax systems, because you start to get more disparities of wealth.

All economies are structured differently - the tax systems, the regulatory systems, the federal systems - and that is as true of Australia and the United States as it is of Australia and Germany and the U.K.

The British use a system where the profits a corporation reports to shareholders is what they pay taxes on. Whereas in America we require corporations to keep two sets of books, one for shareholders and one for the IRS, and the IRS records are secret. For publicly-traded companies, the British system would tend to align the interests of the government with the interests of the company because the company wants to report the biggest possible profit. Though, all wealthy countries have high taxes as wealth requires lots of common goods, from clean water to public education to a justice system.

I was a tax attorney for something like seven years, so I was a tax geek. I was really into it. Tax is one of those things that people think is incredibly boring, but like any science about systems, once you get into it it, becomes incredibly intricate and interesting.

There's such a wide variation in tax systems around the world, it's difficult to imagine a harmonized CO2 tax that every country agrees to. That's not in the cards in the near term. But the countries that are doing the best job, like Sweden, are already doing both of these. I think that eventually we'll use both of them but we need to get started right away and the cap-and-trade is a proven and effective tool.

I have long argued that in the modern world, corporation tax has had its day as a major source of tax revenue.

Global governments should start seriously talking about the creation of a World Tax Authority with the mission to ensure that tax systems will deliver for the public interests in all countries.