Alain Deneault--Paradis fiscaux: La Filière Canadienne/Tax Havens: The Canadian Connection

Alain Deneault, auteur de Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique, lance son nouveau livre, Paradis fiscaux : La filière Canadienne [Montreal Book Launch]:

* La première séance sur les liens historiques entre le Canada et les paradis fiscaux, à l'Upop.

 Date : Mercredi, 5 mars 2014, 17h
Location: Salle des Boiseries, UQAM Pavillon Judith-Jasmin - Salle des Boiseries
405, rue Sainte-Catherine Est Salle J-2805

Revue de Presse


Voici une vidéo de Deneault, où il discute du livre:

J'ai lu le livre et j'aimerais fournir le commentaire suivant:

C’est avec enthousiasme et plaisir que je recommande le livre d’Alain Deneault, Paradis fiscaux : La filière canadienne. Cet ouvrage aborde une question importante et très actuelle, celle de la concurrence que se livrent les États sur le plan de la fiscalité pour séduire le capital et privilégier certaines industries. Ce faisant, ils imposent au reste de la société des coûts dont on ne mesure pas l’ampleur. 
Deneault dépeint habilement le portrait de ce régime mondial en mettant l'accent sur les acteurs canadiens qui ont facilité sa mise en place. En tant que professeure et chercheuse dans le domaine du droit fiscal, je considère que ce livre est une ressource indispensable; il offre une riche mise en contexte culturelle, sociale et historique dont on a grandement besoin pour comprendre comment la concurrence fiscale est devenue le phénomène mondial qu’on connaît aujourd’hui.

I read the book and was happy to provide the following comment:

I am happy to enthusiastically recommend Tax Havens: The Canadian Connection, by Alain Deneault. The book deals with the timely and important topic of how governments engage in tax competition in order to lure in capital and privilege certain industries, at an unmeasured cost to the rest of the society. Deneault deftly weaves a narrative about tax competition by focusing in on the unique roles Canadian players have had in enabling and facilitating this global landscape. As a tax law professor and scholar, I view this work as an indispensable resource, providing a rich cultural, social, and historical context that is surely needed for understanding how tax competition developed into the global phenomenon it is today.  

Quebec's governance crisis continues: mayor who resigned under fraud charge gets $267K severance

There is something seriously broken in a governance system that produces this result, as reported by  the CBC:

The City of Montreal has confirmed that former mayor Michael Applebaum has received more than $267,000 in severance pay. 

Applebaum resigned from office after being arrested in June on 14 charges including fraud and conspiracy.

City spokesman Gonzalo Nunez said the law governing severance payouts does not take into account the reason for the end of time in office, except in the case of death.

Mr. Applebaum and Mr. Tremblay should both disgorge their severance pay of course, and while they are at it, why not all the pay they have ever received from the taxpayers of Quebec, in restitution for abuse of office. But that's not what the law requires. More evidence that we are experiencing a serious governance crisis in Quebec.

Montreal “Mafia Row” Rizzuto house has buy offer

Every penny from this sale ought to go to the City of Montreal. It's not much, but it might cover a few weeks worth of corruption maybe.

Speaking of austerity: Surprise for Quebec's Universities

Just in time for the holidays: the Quebec government has announced it will cut another $140 million from University budgets this year; schools will have to come up with the cuts by April--yes, in 4 months. That's on top of the rolled-back tuition increases, which represented about another $40 million. This is not a good surprise. It's especially harsh when the PQ is raising taxes all over the place and we all know into whose pockets some outlandish proportion of our taxes go. From the Montreal Gazette:

the PQ repeatedly promised to maintain funding to universities for this year despite cancelling the strongly opposed tuition hike that was to have gone into effect this fall. Universities have been waiting for compensation for about $40 million in lost revenues from the aborted increase.

The student protesters see this as an unintended consequence of their success:

Even the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ), which has suggested that universities are more mismanaged than underfunded, was shocked with what president Martine Desjardins called a “hasty” decision. 

“We talked about a redistribution of money, but we never wanted to see university budgets cut,” said Desjardins. “We’re shocked. We fear it’s services to students that will be cut, that students will have to pay the price again.”

I doubt the students alone will pay the price, but the juxtaposition of widespread & rampant corruption, steadily increasing taxes, and steadily increasing cuts to education reads like a serious governance crisis.

Why Are States Broke? Lobbying Hollows out the Tax Core

Over at Naked Capitalism, a lengthy discussion about that $80 billion in state-level corporate welfare from David Segal:

Our states and localities are cannibalizing one another as they concoct targeted tax breaks which they use to lure corporations from their neighbors. Meanwhile, a bevy of middlemen wet their beaks by helping corporations pit sucker states off of one another and brokering deals to sell the tax credits that comprise much of the ensuing largess. 

...It's the most basic of game theory dilemmas, and in a less corrupt political dynamic, one that could be solved by the intervention of sensible federal government actors, or perhaps even through the initiation of an interstate compact that had states agree to stop poaching from one another. 

Segal offers up Boeing as an example of the more successful manipulators ("Washington State residents bested a couple dozen other states, offering to pay the hometown company $3 billion not to forsake them" but South Carolina eventually won when it "offered Boeing around $1 billion to open a Dreamliner plant there.") Segal says only the WTO has "threatened to provide any sort of meaningful check" on these subsidies.

He also singles out one of my favorite targets, the infamous and ludicrous state film tax incentive war:

Perhaps the most transparently absurd manifestation of war-between-the-states phenomenon is the case of the film tax credit ... [which] spurred the most precipitous race to the bottom I've witnessed in my time in politics. It came to a head in 2009, when Wisconsin had just spent $100,000 dollars to support Johnny Depp's personal grooming expenses and Connecticut was fixing to subsidize episodes of Jerry Springer's talk show — lots of broken chairs to pay for.  ... California's recent budget includes a half-billion in tax credits of its own ... to keep Hollywood from off-shoring to Manhattan, Indianapolis, and Santa Fe, which are offering bribes of their own. ... At least 42 states now provide incentives, with some exceeding 40% of production costs.

That battle is lost, I think, and state-to-state is only compounded internationally. Hello Quebec, I'm looking at you, boasting about your "most advantageous cash rebates available in North America"--with your 25 % cash-back on all expenses, your 20 % bonus on all CGI and Green screen shots and no minimum spend, no caps; you don't even have to release the film in Quebec. Paradise.

Segal's got the analysis right:

all that we're doing is paying people to move jobs to-and-fro, creating no new social value, and reducing net public benefit.

WHen you do that among the several states it seems merely silly; when you do it among countries, however, that's a bit of a different matter now isn't it.

He also explains the mechanisms of the film tax credit and concludes that

tax credits of this form are always a raw deal for the public, unless a substantial percentage of the credits go unclaimed: A full 25% or so of the subsidy is misfiring, going to middlemen and corporations with significant tax burdens. If you want to fund something efficiently, just fork over cash. (This, of course, could never be made to happen, since then the public would understand that all we're really doing is forking over cash to millionaires.)

Well said. More at the link.