Joe Manchin throws in with foreign tax havens

This is not, I think, what even conservative West Virginians want.

I try to pay Senator Joe Manchin (D.-West Va.) no mind because his Lucy-and-the-football game with Democratic leaders is extremely tiresome. But his reversal on the global minimum corporate tax situates him to the right not only of West Virginia Democrats but also of West Virginia Republicans. Congress will probably pass the global minimum tax eventually, even if it goes Republican, for reasons I explain in my latest New Republic piece. But Manchin’s switch is a serious setback, one that makes no substantive economic sense for various reasons I enumerate here.

The photograph above shows Seven Mile Beach on Grand Cayman. Even the Caymans, where the corporate income tax rate is zero, is willing to sign on to the global minimum corporate tax. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is not, and it’s holding up approval from the European Union in cahoots with congressional Republicans in America. Why Manchin would align himself with a foreign proto-fascist against a common-sense global reform that benefits the United States more than just about anyone else is beyond my understanding. Read my piece.