The OECD hopes that the new reporting standards will provide tax administrators with useful information to more effectively direct auditors while making it easier to identify artificial profit shifting to tax-advantaged environments. This public comment will argue that the accounting costs of country-by-country reporting will be larger than the Department of the Treasury’s revenue gains and that there will be even higher unanticipated costs from inadvertent disclosures of sensitive information. Because the costs of information centralization will be greater than the benefits, we recommend that the IRS should not implement the proposed regulation on country-by-country reporting. This recommendation is informed by a recent paper from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University that explains key features of the international corporate tax system, the changes the OECD wants to make, and the potentially far-reaching consequences of those changes. The study also provides recommendations to improve corporate taxation without compromising state sovereignty or taxpayer rights.
The first fundamental question for policymakers in this area is defining the policy goal. I believe the appropriate goal of competition policy related to online platforms should be the promotion of consumer welfare—a concept rigorously defined in the economics literature. Consumer welfare is maximized when every unit of every resource is employed in the use that consumers value most highly. Competition policy agencies in the United States typically regard consumer welfare as the sole goal of competition policy. Even if policymakers choose to pursue goals other than consumer welfare, they need to understand the impact of policies on consumer welfare so they can act with full information of the relevant tradeoffs.
The Department of Transportation (DOT) is proposing to implement a national registration system for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs), the details of which are to be recom- mended by a task force no later than November 20. The stated aim of the registry is to assist in identifying owners and operators of UASs that violate the law and endanger safety, thereby closing a perceived gap in enforcement. This comment highlights several major procedural concerns, followed by an examination of whether the safety benefits of a registry are likely to outweigh the societal and budgetary costs.
After reviewing the NRC’s mission, its legislative mandates and constraints, and recent research on low-dose radiation, there appears to be strong evidence to support reconsidering the LNT as the default dose-response model for ionizing radiation.
Around the world, the number of registered commercial drone operators is rapidly increasing. Unfortunately, few of them are in the United States thanks to an outdated and taxing regulatory scheme that has failed to keep pace with technological innovation.
This comment addresses the efficiency and efficacy of this proposed rule from an economic point of view. Specifically, it examines how the proposed rule may be improved by more closely examining the societal goals the rule intends to achieve and whether this proposed regulation will successfully achieve those goals. In many instances, regulations can be substantially improved by choosing more effective regulatory options or more carefully assessing the actual societal problem.
San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest correctional institution, sits on a 432-acre compound overlooking the beautiful San Francisco Bay. Inside, in grim juxtaposition to the prison’s waterfront view, 701 men currently sit in the antiquated concrete cells that make up the largest death row in the Western hemisphere. In addition, the prison’s four cellblocks also hold minimum-, medium- and maximum-security inmates, supervised by a prison staff of more than a thousand.
The FAA must carefully consider the potential effect of UASs on the US economy. If it does not, innovation and technological advancement in the commercial UAS space will find a home elsewhere in the world. Many of the most innovative UAS advances are already happening abroad, not in the United States. If the United States is to be a leader in the development of UAS technologies, the FAA must open the American skies to innovation.
This comment, which reiterates concerns laid out in the attached opinion piece, does not represent the views of any particular affected party or special interest group but is designed to assist FINRA as it considers implementing the Comprehensive Automated Risk Data System (CARDS).
Mercatus PhD Fellow Vipin Veetil, along with Akshaya Vijayalakshmi and Srikanth Viswanathan, address Amartya Sen's criticism of cash-transfer programs such as education vouchers in the Wall Street Journal.
This study represents a serious challenge to conventional thinking in contemporary comparative systems, and the economics of socialism. It disputes the commonly accepted view of both the nature of the 'socialist calculation debate' of the 1930s and the lessons to be derived from it.