Global elites demonstrate they are still out of touch with the struggles of their people by instituting environmental and tax policies that would further hurt the global economy.
July 11, 2022
By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP
Politics is the dead horse political elites beat to make themselves appear to be doing something. They technically are doing something, just nothing that helps anyone else.
These are the same great leaders that all take their personal private jets to the Climate Summit meetings, while eating lavish expensive meals, and determining the fates of the poor around the world.
Let’s do away with fossil fuels! Who cares that its plentiful and cheap! It’s far more important to save a polar bear in Antarctica than pull a family out of poverty in Mumbai.
Let’s impose a universal corporate tax! It’s not fair that countries compete with their tax rates to lure corporations in at the expense of their coffers!
The things they are talking about are luxury issues. Climate and social justice are not things high on the priority lists of people who are deep in the struggle.
Protests are breaking out around the world. World leaders are being put on blast. But they keep gathering around the dead horses for their ceremonial beatings.
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka is suffering tremendous economic hardship. So much so, what started off as peaceful protests, slowly evolved into an overthrow of the sitting president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
The economic crisis developed after the COVID-19 pandemic hammered the tourism-reliant economy and slashed remittances from overseas workers.
It has been compounded by the build-up of hefty government debt, rising oil prices and a ban on the import of chemical fertilisers last year that devastated agriculture. The fertiliser ban was reversed in November.
However, many blame the country’s decline on economic mismanagement by Rajapaksa.
Discontent has increased in recent weeks as the cash-strapped country stopped receiving fuel shipments, forcing school closures and rationing of petrol and diesel for essential services.
Whether they are locked down or cut off from their resources, the net result is the same: thee people of Sri Lanka are suffering.
They stormed the capitol and the president’s home, ultimately setting his house on fire. The Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe offered to also step down if it would restore the peace.
The country is seeking an IMF bailout of $3 billion. Meanwhile inflation reached a record 54.6% in June and is expected to hit 70% over the next several months.
Holland
The press was quick to call the Trucker Convoy in Canada nothing more than performative right wing lunacy.
But as it turns out, Dutch farmers don’t take kindly to sweeping and controlling regulations either. In Canada’s case, truckers took to Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates. In Holland, they are protesting net-zero climate regulations to cut nitrogen and ammonia emissions from the agricultural sector.
Inspired by the “freedom convoys” which began in Canada and saw truck drivers bring major roads to a standstill in protest at Covid vaccine mandates, tractors are blockading supermarkets and industrial complexes across the Netherlands, at a cost of tens of millions of euros to businesses and the economy.
These regulations ultimately threaten to destroy inter-generational farming businesses, in a country which is the second largest agricultural exporter to the US. Agriculture is 83% of the Dutch GDP, and if that collapses, there will be a ripple-effect across all Western Europe.
The ecological ambitions of the government aren’t about adopting better practices or technologies. In fact Holland’s agricultural industry has been a leader in sustainable, low consumption, high production farming.
These ambitions would leave farmers with no choice but to cut their livestock by as much as 70%!
New regulations may force farmers to cut production and herd numbers by up to 30 percent to meet emission requirements by the state.
The government is slated to cut nitrogen oxide and ammonia by 50 percent by 2030…
Farms near national parks are being hit the hardest. Claiming that ecosystems have been damaged by nitrogen pollution, the government plans to cut greenhouse gas nitrogen by up to 70 percent in areas closer to nature reserves.
Pushing a Green Agenda with no alternative in place, is destructive. It’s like the US driving out fossil fuels, prescribing everyone buy an electric car, only to plug into a grid that cannot even handle average summer electrical consumption.
Everywhere in the world is experiencing some form of economic hardship. Some of us understood its inevitability when we watched much of the world’s response to the pandemic:
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Locking down
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Closing or restricting businesses
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Restricting or denying travel
Turns out if you shut down the world for a year, you can do some real damage. Go figure.
Two things you don’t do in an economic downturn: impose costly environmental regulations and raise taxes. Welp, the elites have decided to do both instead of neither, and it’s going to be a total shamble storm.
Hungary
If you recall, last September we told you that Ireland was the last and only hold out on the Globalist push for a universal 15% corporate tax. Sadly, Ireland has since capitulated, relinquishing its low tax policy that attracted the likes of Google and Facebook to set up their European operations there.
Here are the basic terms of the agreement:
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It imposes a minimum 15% effective tax rate on companies with global revenue of at least 750 million euros (USD866 million).
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Ireland will be allowed to retain the 12.5% rate for companies with revenue of less than 750 million euros.
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This means 160,000 companies that employ 1.8 million people will see no change in their tax rate.
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The new 15% tax rate will apply to 1,500 foreign-owned companies and 56 Irish multinationals employing a total of 500,000 people.
All set? Nope! Enter Hungary!
Ireland was known for its 12.5% corporate tax rate, to ALL corporations regardless of size or revenues. It was how it not only drew in businesses, and grew its economy after their EU bailout, but it’s how they continued to be a business friendly hub in Western Europe.
Similarly, Hungary drew down from a 19% corporate tax rate to a mere and astonishing 9% over the last twelve years.
At the time of Hungary’s veto, the country’s finance minister, Mihaly Varga, hinted that Budapest could still be persuaded: “The work is not ready. I think we have to continue the effort to find a solution.”
That could be a veiled reference to something else entirely that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is seeking: billions of dollars in loans and grants from the EU’s Covid-19 recovery fund.
Budapest had originally requested 7.2 billion Euros in grants; after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Hungary said it would seek low-interest loans, too. Approval stalled over EU concerns that Hungary lacks safeguards against corruption as the money is disbursed.
Poland had likewise opposed the adoption of the 15% minimum tax—that is, until the EU agreed to shell out almost 38 billion Euros in pandemic recovery loans and grants that was similarly delayed.
Purhaps this is just a matter of playing hardball for some EU welfare, as was the case with Poland. But it makes no sense to raise corporate taxes during a global recession.
The US is likewise threatening to end a 43 year long tax treaty with Hungary if they don’t get on board. Tax treaties are basically used by corporations to tax shop and see which country has the best regime for their business.
The brain trust of current global elites don’t think this dwindling economy could use some robust competition.
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