As the United States gets into the swing of an election-year, President Barack Obama has offered to cut corporate tax rate 28 percent, a move that commentators have said is a direct challenge to his Republican rivals.
President Obama’s long-awaited business tax plan, if passed, would lower the corporate tax rate from the current 35 percent to 28 percent.
Calling the current tax system “outdated, unfair, and inefficient”, Obama said:
The US does not need an experiment with a flat tax. A careful study of countries that have embraced a flat tax system demonstrated three main pre-conditions that required a flat tax; none of which the US has. Adopting a flat tax would only confirm what many suspect but hope is not true: that America is broke, desperate for inward investment, incompetently governed, and increasingly ruled by a self-regarding oligarchic elite.
A group of bipartisan senators in the United States is pushing forward an online sales tax bill, which could spell an abrupt end to tax-free internet shopping.
On Wednesday, a group of Republican and Democratic senators jointly introduced a bill, dubbed the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would give states the authority to collect internet sales tax from all out-of-state retailers. Online retailers with less than $500,000 in annual sales would be exempted.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has lent his weight in support for a Tobin tax, ahead of his presentation at the G20 meeting in Cannes.
Bill Gates, billionaire technology entrepreneur and philanthropist, recently spoke to the BBC about asking the G20 to step up development efforts to ease poverty and his backing on a tax on financial transactions, adding that “steps have to be taken to restore confidence” that governments will pay their debts.
The effective tax rate paid by FTSE-100 companies has dropped to 26% compared to 35.8% just two years ago, while firms have seen profits increase.
According to research conducted by accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young, Britain’s FTSE-100 companies have reduced their tax rates by almost a third in the last two years, a consequence partly due to the reduction in headline corporate tax rates in the UK.
FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act has been recently enacted by the Obama Administration, requiring U.S. citizens living abroad to file U.S. tax returns and detailed annual foreign account disclosure statements going back to 2003.
The recently published World Development Report 2007, which largely concentrates upon investing for human capital (Youth) is really a challenge on the part of developing nations over the world constituting 1.3 billions of young peoples. It is the lack of funds, which has enervated the country’s initiatives.
