Meanwhile, Republican leaders have not ruled out tax cuts without corresponding revenue increases. Our current circumstances are different from in another major regard: the international angle to American taxation is much different. Waves of inversions where a domestic company becomes a subsidiary of a foreign company in order to pay less under a different tax regime started gaining major attention by the early aughts.
Despite ongoing efforts by Treasury, this remains a significant problem. Trying to tax American multinationals abroad can be difficult because of intangibles—intellectual property like patents technology and medicine being the most problematic industries is highly mobile and hard to catch on a balance sheet. Companies have also gotten very sophisticated at shifting debt for tax avoidance purposes. While it would be possible to collect more revenue by going after tax avoidance, that would pit congressional leaders against the wealthiest interests in the world, on policy issues that are understood well by very few specialists, making it harder for the public to demand them.
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This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again. Why is public service reform so difficult? Jun 1, Damian Hind. More posts by the Author ». Support Us Support Our Work. Privacy Overview This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible.
Strictly Necessary Cookies Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings. Enable or Disable Cookies. Enable All Save Changes. Progressives, normally content with passing all sorts of regulations and crimes, reflexively oppose those we empower to enforce the laws they pass, often with abolitionist talking points and accusations of racism. The two ends of this political spectrum often pass each other without hitting any point of agreement.
Further complicating the issue are the police unions. Police unions claim to speak for the police, but do they really? Police officers tend to be a right-of-center group. Unions even police unions are almost always left-of-center in their politics. Police officers and police unions have overlapping interests in some cases, but where they speak to genuine law enforcement officer concerns and where they speak to union concerns is lost in the dressing.
Unions are the darlings of the far left, the far right reflexively supports law enforcement, and the police union is therefore a political paradox unseen anywhere else. Police unions either represent collectivist union interests or they represent government agents dictating the terms of their power in relation to your liberty-pick your poison. What other entity is given the courtesy by legislative members to change bills and then still come up to testify against the amended bill.
Why would a member modify a bill to appease the unions when they will not support the bill even as amended? The next time you hear a police officer claim he is only enforcing the laws that the legislature makes as it should be , consider the fact that those supposedly speaking on his behalf probably had more than a little hand in crafting that law. How perverse is that? An evidence-based and analytically sound case for reform serves both to improve the quality of policy and to enhance prospects for reform adoption.
The impact of economic analysis also depends on the source: research presented by an authoritative, non-partisan institution that commands trust across the political spectrum appears to have a far greater impact. Building such institutions can take time, as their effectiveness depends greatly on their reputation, but in countries that have them, their prior analysis appears to have enhanced the prospects for reform in particular areas.
Partly for these reasons, successful structural reforms take time. The more successful reforms in the study generally took over two years to prepare and adopt - and this does not include the "pre-work" done in the many episodes in which problems and proposals had been debated and studied for years before the authorities set to work framing specific reforms.
By contrast, many of the least successful reform attempts were undertaken in haste, often in response to immediate pressures: when it comes to policy reform, more haste can indeed make for less speed. Pension reforms, in particular, often have relatively long gestation times, involving a considerable amount of careful study and consultation.
While governments should be ready to use political "windows of opportunity" when they open up, this may create problems if it leads to excessive haste. The cohesion of the government is also critical.
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