Courtesy of Mish.
I was in vacation all last week in the Crested Butte area of Colorado, a very beautiful area. On the flight back home last evening I was thinking about how the UK could make the most of Brexit.
One of the ways I came up with was for the UK to cut corporate taxes and truly embrace free trade. I wrote about that at 2:00 AM this morning in Stellar Opportunity for UK to Set Example for the World.
I was unaware that UK chancellor George Osborne had decided to do cut taxes.
It’s Noon and I just got up, surprised to see this headline: France Hits Out at UK Plan to Cut Corporate Tax.
France’s finance minister has warned that the UK’s plan to slash corporate taxes could hit Britain’s negotiations with the EU following the country’s vote to leave the bloc.
Michel Sapin said the initiative — which officials in both Paris and Berlin view as hostile — could affect Britain’s prospects of retaining the “European passport” that allows financial groups to sell their services and raise funds in the EU’s single market.
“I am not persuaded that this is a good thing for the UK,” the French minister said of Britain’s corporate tax plans at a press conference on Monday. “This will not change anything on the passport for instance. In fact, it’s not a good way to start a negotiation.”
Mr Sapin also criticised the “manners” of George Osborne, the UK chancellor who has promised to cut the corporate tax rate by five points to 15 per cent in an attempt to boost Britain’s attractiveness to business in the wake of last month’s referendum.
His comments echo remarks by Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, who last week criticised the UK’s fiscal “race to the bottom”.
France and Germany are both concerned that the UK will be tempted to establish itself as a low-tax offshore jurisdiction in the EU’s outskirts in response to the Leave vote.
Michel Sapin Pisses and Moans
First Step in Training a Mule
There’s an old saying “The first step in training a mule is to hit it as hard as you can in the head with a stick.”
I don’t really advise that with mules, but it is the precise thing to do to EU nannycrats.
