Mr. O'Malley's toughness -- what some call ruthlessness -- served him well in the refinery business, where profit margins are thin, taxes high and environmental scrutiny intense.
To him, bank secrecy and wafer-thin tax rates are services the country offers just like its dairy products and its leading export, dental prosthetics.
America and Japan had thinner tax wedges than most other OECD countries.In this section Overview Output, prices and jobs The Economist commodity-price index (1) The Economist commodity-price index (2) Trade, exchange rates, budget balances and interest rates Markets Taxing wages Reprints.
In a recession, with thinning tax receipts and more pressure to stay within the strict budgetary limits laid down for members of the new single currency, the euro, EU countries will find it hard to change this picture of static or falling defence spending.The relationship between the European force and NATO also remains a problem.
The fortunes of the four groups are summarised in the table.You take the high roadThe first group, labelled "mainly English-speaking" by the OECD (Japan, South Korea and Switzerland are honorary Anglophones), tends to have weaker job protection, less generous unemployment benefits and thinner tax wedges than the average.
If the alternative is borrowing at razor-thin, tax-deductible interest rates — Microsoft, for instance, paid less than 1 percent on a portion of its debt — it is a no-brainer to use that route to fill domestic coffers.
One way to structure this approach would be as a "thin capitalization" tax — so companies of any kind would be taxed on debts that exceeded some reasonable multiple of their equity (perhaps a multiple of three or four).
Burst housing bubbles have revealed how thin the tax base is.Ireland has already tightened fiscal policy by some 5% of GDP since July 2008, in the midst of a savage recession.
The Stretched-Thins are taxed at a marginal rate as high as 37% today.
