EU adopts global minimum 15% tax on big business
bbc.com
bbc.com
This is Pillar 2 of the OECDs tax reform for corporations.
Pillar 1 is much more interesting, and would require corporations to actually book profits where they are made (so not putting everything through Ireland for example). This will have a much bigger impact imo than this 15% ruling, because right now there are a bunch of tricks you can use to get round any tax rate.
For example, even though Ireland's headline tax rate is currently 12.5%, the effective rate after all the tricks for many US tech cos was <1% to the Irish state.
VAT in France on the subscription makes sense, but figuring out where the profit lies, is more nebulous.
A 3% tax on total revenue is the same as a 15% tax on the profits of a product with 20% profit margins.
It also discourages long-term investments, and further rewards short-termism (which everyone seems to dislike).
One of the biggest policy problems with revenue taxes is that the effective tax rate is much higher on smaller companies than larger companies. A large vertically integrated company like Apple would pay a lower effective tax rate on an iPhone than any of their competitors, giving them a natural advantage. These are pretty dis-economic policy outcomes and the main reason no one seriously considers revenue taxes.
Revenue is recognized as the size of a sales transaction. The number of sales transactions required to build and sell a given product can vary enormously based on the structure of the business, usually as a product of optimizing for efficiency and specialization. When you tax revenue, businesses have a large incentive to restructure their business to optimize for minimizing the number of sales transactions in the course of building the product, because revenue taxes essentially compound as a function of the number of transactions which is then a cost of business. The compounding is why revenue taxes are so low, usually around 1%. Being tax efficient lowers your costs more than being business efficient, leading to bloated and non-competitive companies.
I've operated a business under one of the few revenue tax regimes. The perverse incentives to verticalize the business structure are very real. Revenue taxes add up quickly.
I'm here all year, tip the waitress!
Don't think so.
Profit only happens when there is revenue.
Cost is a negative influence on profit, revenue is the positive influence.
If you have zero cost, you still have profit (provided you have non-zero revenue).
If you have zero revenue, you don't have profit.
So it is obvious that the profit is where the revenue is, even though revenue ≠ profit.
The fact that it matches the revenue exactly shows that its not a real lisencing deal
I strongly support immediately jailing anyone found to be playing these licensing games. They're parasites who have no place in society until they've shown reform.
Stupid games, stupid prizes, etc.
If I have a warehouse in France, some of the profit was in France and some was where it was made in the US. Same thing here where there's lots of small pieces done wherever.
Not sure but I'm seeing 2 different conversations here: flat tax on what you pay at the pump... and what the company reports as profit at the end of the day.
France doesn't care if you make a profit or not on the 8.50... just like Apple doens't care when they take 30% off the top.
Am I reading it wrong? Is it 15% off the top ala Apple Store? or 15% off of profits? both of which are different conversations.
Looking at the article, it seems like a nothing burger until it's voted in officially... The Paris Accord was "passed"... and then left because it was just a verbal agreement. What's enforcing this and stopping the next POTUS from leaving it all together?
That is not the tax that is being referred to here, which is Corporation Tax - the tax on corporate profits.
Giant tech company, pay your 15% based on local advertising revenue from local customers. We all know you'll still be making huge profits regardless of your costs. Your whole business is built on fixed costs and infinite scaling of revenue.
If you really can't afford to pay 15% then leave the market, someone will certainly take your place.
That's a cost, not profit.
> the content was made in X
Cost, not profit.
> the deal for the content was negotiated in Y
Negotiating the deal also sounds like a cost to me.
> network source is Z
Cost.
The profit is made where you get money, not where you spend it.
Why not replace income tax with VAT/sales tax if sales is the basis of taxation anyway?
It puts the government in a weird spot where they really don't want any businesses that primarily sell to foreign countries since they don't get tax revenue to fund public services for that company.
Say a US company's French subsidiary sold something for $10 in France. If the software is developed in the US, then the US company will sell it to the French subsidiary for $9, so then they only have pay profits on $1 in France. Then in the US, they will say they paid $3 in costs and sold the software to their French counterpart for $9, booking $6 of profits in the US at a lower rate.
Where were the profits from that device made? Surely not entirely in Australia (or any of the other single jurisdictions), as actual value was added in several different locations.
A digital good is handed to me wherever I am when I purchase it, so I pay taxes in that jurisdiction.
So if a company had $100B global revenue and $10B global profit and 0% of the profit was in France while 10% of the revenue was in France, then the company should be taxed based on the $1B profit that can be attributed to France based on revenue there.
Any other scheme seems it’s prone to creative licensing schemes and similar.
Why is that fair? In your example, if UK provided 100% of the labor shouldn’t UK get 100% of the tax to support social programs for that 100% labor?
Labor seems a better way to distribute and incentivize employment.
Work effort could be distorted in whatever fashion the country wants. They could declare all their work is done in some off shore 0% tax nation and pay nothing.
The UK gets 100% already from the income tax for their workers.
It’s not fair in the sense that the right countries necessarily get the tax money - but it’s certainly more likely than it is today.
It’s not fair in that it guarantees businesses aren’t taxed too much or too little, but it does guarantee that the profits are taxed somewhere which ends the incentive to shift the profits around.
Perhaps “fair” is the wrong word. I mean “fair” as in hard to evade overall, not fair distribution.
Then there is little or no revenue local to France.
You will have to go after financialization tricks, where healthy companies get loaded with debt, weird tricks with assets and all the stuff the finance industry comes up with that has nothing to do with core function of the company. Now imagine the powerful lobby you have to work against.
Food for thought: in a distribution chain you will find lots of small value adds. Take sea ports, there are loads of companies that handle import of materials or products. The price they charge for their goods/services are dominated by their import costs.
Consequently, it’s a terrible idea.
If anything bigger buisnesses have more ressources to avoid taxes. - Thus having everyone pay the same would lead to large companies paying more than they do now and small companies would be barely affected.
corporations aren't people, and I think you know this. "corporate personhood" means that a corporation has some (not all) of the rights held by individual people. it certainly does not mean that it makes sense to tax corporations as if they were humans that filed a W-2 each year.
what do you think would be solved by jacking up the corporate tax rate specifically? or put differently, whose pocket do you imagine this money comes out of?
the owners are already taxed on any income or capital gains they derive from ownership, employee pay is taxed on both sides, and retail customers pay sales tax. none of those taxes are necessarily optimal, but their impact is at least better understood than corporate tax.
If a global company like Google pays a global company like Apple $K billion to be the default search engine on iphones, should Apple consider that revenue to be all in the US because Google is headquartered in the US even though it's purchasing something that will apply to people in lots of countries? Does it matter if Google uses local corporations in a number of companies to each pay Apple? If Google pays through its subsidiary in the jurisdiction with the highest corporate taxes, can it force Apple to realize revenue there?
It would not be that difficult to pay EU taxes based on % of revenue attributed to each country. I.e. if you made $1B, and 70% of your revenue came from The Netherlands, and 30% came from Germany, you'd pay Dutch taxes on $700M and German taxes on $300M.
I'd really love to see progressive taxation of corporate revenue: the bigger a company is the higher the tax rate. Huge corporations benefit from economies of scale, so there is an incentive for power concentration. This power concentration is bad for society: it delivers increasing wealth disparity and allows businesses to grow "too big to fail" leading to corruption.
To solve this, in most countries, companies are taxed VAT instead, so intead of taxing the total value of product at every step, you are only taxing the value the company adds in the process.
Effectively the government is taxing the total value of the product at a fixed rate once but that tax is being split among the companies which helped supply that product proportionally to the value added by each company.
there are 2 taxes.
direct and indirect.
direct taxes are paid by recipient themselves. (income tax is an example. a person/corp pays a tax on "net income after deductions" at whatever percentage)
indirect taxes are "collected" by the taxpayer but the person who ultimately buys a product pays it as the cost of product is inclusive of this indirect tax. VAT or GST or whatever. a business who is registered for indirect tax collects it from the customer and pays it to government. this indirect tax is not shown in their profit and loss account because for a business, they are just an intermediary.
direct tax OTOH, is shown in p&l because it there is PBT>tax>PAT.
Yes, and that’s why it’s weird that the most important resource for most big corporations is taxed like that. All the human labor gets taxed based on revenue and not profit, unlike all the other raw materials.
It's assumed that corporations spend as little as possible on operations. Individuals obviously don't. Whereas a corporation wouldn't rent employees 500 sqft / person, individuals regularly rent/purchase that density for themselves. Similarly, while a corporation might buy a Camry and run in into the ground, some individuals will buy a new BMW every 3 years.
Corporations also don't have a motive to exist beyond profits. If you tax revenue and make profits untenable, then corporations simply will not exist. Individuals on the other hand try not to die.
The curve used to shape the tax rate as company size grows could be tuned to mitigate many of the potential negative side effects of this.
In my misspent youth, I worked on a 10% project that helped consolidate and free-up racks of servers so that they could be physically forklifted between space leased/owned by different subsidiaries of one of the world's 5 largest corporations (by market cap). I heard through the grapevine that the main reason for this arrangement was so that these subsidiaries qualified for small business discounts on electricity, and they wanted to keep physical separation in different parts of the datacenters to bolster the case that the various subsidiaries were in fact separate entities.
When you adjust taxes and rates based on company size (or things correlated with company size), you need to be careful about subsidiary loopholes.
What does it help Apple that they have hundreds of billions of dollars sitting somewhere in their offshore accounts if they cannot use that money?
Having these monopolies (defining loosely - whether one company or a 2 or 3 or 4) is the main deficiency of capitalism.
Unfortunately, breaking up monopolies or increases taxes is exceedingly difficult to do as large companies and their lobbying congress prevents it in most cases.
A ridiculous assumption. Corporations are incredibly wasteful and tend to solve problems by piling money on them until they’re fixed.
If they have to spend the money in the same country as they gained the profits, that might work as intended.
Only half-ironic though. There is a problem with industries that are viable and important in the longer term, but are at risk of being shut down in shorter terms due to market fluctuation. Subsidies help them off the ground on one hand, but ossify their structure and skew the incentives (by definition) on the other hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
Would steel consumers be better off if the largest steel companies were broken in to smaller pieces?
What does your imagined tax bracket structure look like if the top 100 companies aren't at the highest, most painful bracket? "Barely being in the top 100" means you're enormous.
> Would steel consumers be better off if the largest steel companies were broken in to smaller pieces?
Well pretty much everything in the economy runs on steel, and you're proposing removing their economies of scale and taxing them on revenue. Do you think they're going to be better off?
Let's imagine it's a true perfect competition world. Steel producers make basically 0 profit on average (this is not the case). Next year supply crunch. Costs go up 10%. Steel producers need to raise prices by 10% to stay profitable. But wait, now their taxes are based on their revenues, so if they raise their prices by 10%, they take on at least 10% more taxes, so now they're losing money. They'll need to raise their prices high enough to earn enough revenue to offset the increased taxes. But wait, turns out other countries make steel too, and these companies are realistic enough to tax on profits only. So now American steel is too expensive to compete.
When you have high fixed costs and low variable costs, a revenue tax is brutal because you need high revenues to even begin to break a profit.
This would destroy economies of scale and cause the price of steel to skyrocket. It would send the entire economy into a tailspin.
Low margin, large scale businesses are highly efficient from an economic standpoint. Doing anything to hurt these businesses would be disastrous to the economy. We want to encourage efficiency, not punish it.
Will we ever live in a society where you aren't allowed to "write off" R&D/depreciation/the typical things companies use to avoid profits?
We want companies to reinvest their profits into growth to hire more employees, right?
Where do we draw the line to make it harder for them to do so?
It depends. In some countries it is easy, it others it isn’t. Depends on what can be counted as an expense and what part of that purchase can be accounted for in a given fiscal year depending on when it was purchased…
For example. Germany. If a company buys computer equipment in December, they cannot deduct 100% of the value for the fiscal year that is about to finish because that computer equipment cannot be reasonably used for the whole fiscal year. So a company can deduct 1/12th of the value. Of course the reminder can be deducted in the following year but the profit is already affected for the previous year. And don’t get me even started on advance taxes companies have to pay.
> It was praised by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as "an historic agreement which helps even the playing field".
This is a global goal, not just an EU Law.
> The US has not taken steps to adopt the rules so far, despite Ms Yellen's championship of the plan.
There is no way Malta will play along, it is a small state abusing all the EU benefits for nefarious purposes and never contributing anything useful.
This is just an example, there are many, many more more sophisticated schemes like that, Malta is just doing it openly.
In other words, this is a bit of a headline without any actual teeth (there’s plenty of ways to compete unfairly), which is the problem when you start wanting to govern the world, you can’t cover all the bases.
Instead, laws around making sure that the profits generated from a countries citizens are taxed by that country make more sense to me. A lot of laws around that already exist, and I suppose a lot of people would say that they have not been effective.
A lot of it comes down to the treatment of Intelectual Property. A lot of the tax games that companies play relate to licencing their IP around between different countries. I wonder what would happen if a country tried banning licencing of IP between related parties internationally?
They really aren't. Q8, the gas stations, have been in Denmark for 30 year, if not more, they've apparently never been profitable, certainly not enough to pay taxes. The same goes for Coca Cola, which may have start to pay taxes.
The only solution I've seen propose is a revenue tax. Similar to a VAT it would be added at the point of sale, making it impossible to avoid for companies. In return corporation would pay tax on profits. It has it own set of problem though.
What about people who migrate somewhere else? What about dual+ citizenships? It makes little sense for me to pay taxes in a country I haven't lived in for 20 years.
The games with revoking citizenship of Snowden, etc. ate absurd and should not be allowed. Even if the person is a criminal, he must server punishment defined in law. He is still 'your' American/greek/ whatever criminal
It's not like any of those C-only peers could easily visit or move to A or B, either, based on how you've described their policies.
If anyone is worse off in that scenario, it would be the C-only children with C-only parents. Those families are pretty much stuck dealing only with country C, no matter what. The multi-citizenship family, on the other hand, could potentially benefit from the ability of a parent returning to A or B for a period of time, for example.
You seem to be mistakenly portraying the family with more options and flexibility as "victims", when in practice they're actually much better off than others are.
It's the idea that we know what's best for you and you better adapt because there is no escaping. It's the fundamental idea of many social justice movements that require totalitarian methods to get what they want.
This is why self-determination is such important concept, something that the global utopians can never really grasp.
s/leave/rent a new PO Box over here and change some DNS records/
That's not fundamental freedom, that's a variation on Hobson's choice.
But even if you can't leave, seeing the results of another country that does something a different way is a valuable comparison point that can drive a change of policy where you are.
True, one could argue that seeing the results in other countries that do things a different way was indeed valuable and the lesson was to adopt a global minimum 15% tax on big business.
I'm not sure it's a fundamental freedom, but it is important.
If a law exists over the whole world, there's no competition and no alternative to compare against.
Of course countries with high taxes are all for raising taxes in countries where they are lower!
Now, unfortunately the article does not mention the interesting bit, which is that EU countries with lower corporation tax will therefore have to raise their rates. I'm thinking especially about Hungary and with the current tense relations I'm surprised that they agreed... What is the deal?
This can also work with income taxes. For example if you set income tax at 100%, you'd get 0 revenue probably because no one would work. This effect happens at values below 100%
For many small/remote countries, lower corporation tax is a way to attract companies that would never have come if the tax rate was higher.
Either that, or the groups (EU, NATO) will have to change their rules to allow a few no votes on things, or they'll just become broken orgs. I'm sure Russia would offer almost anything to the wanna-be dictators in Turkey and Hungary to get them to vote no on these things. These "complete agreement" democratic groups don't work when some leaders are dictators.
Also at the end of the day most EU laws are aquiescence rules: if you have a specification for cucumbers it must be like this. But if you don't have such a spec (and producers in other countries aren't prevented from doing business with you) then you don't need to put the rule into place. After all, every EU "law" is actually a description which has be be implemented in each country by its legislature.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-deal-hungary-drop-vetoe-r...
Also the EU repeatedly called out Hungary for corruption but now Hungary is having its moment pointing that several member of the european parliaments have been caught in a very serious corruption scandal (and these are only those who got caught).
What a great happy honorable Union full of integrity we enjoy too.
In effect any corporation tax is a double tax.
There are a whole host of corporate entities which allow for pass-through taxation: LLC, S-Corp, sole proprietorships, and the like. I'd be surprised if European countries didn't have similar mechanisms.
Intermediate entities like LLCs are a relatively recent Americanism that’s unusual in the rest of the world.
And doesn't that create an artificial pressure for money to change hands fewer times (for example, in the production of a consumer good)?
€800 VAT the company charged to clients
€500 VAT the company paid to suppliers
===== -
€300 VAT the company has to pay to authorities
ULTIMATELY, the consumer pays the VAT. The consumer cannot deduct VAT.
Sure, big ticket items people might shop around for a lower tax but will they not buy something based on minimizing the amount they pay to the government?
The MMT argument for taxation is that it's necessary to encourage demand for a currency, thus making it more valuable. But there's no fundamental reason that a government which controls its own currency must collect taxes to pay for various services.
Congress could pay state and local governments directly each year.
If you're willing to throw away some property rights, then state and local governments could theoretically lease land as a means of raising revenue without direct taxation. (this is a terrible idea)
Why is it a terrible idea?
This is what people forget about (especially tech minded people), when they think up new systems of taxation that would be more fair and effective: Any fair and effective tax would destroy the currency, since people and businesses could easily pay their share and then instantly convert their remaining wealth into non-fiat assets, or even safer fiat assets. In order to prop up the value of the fiat currency, the tax system needs to be extremely bureaucratic and reach into every and any kind of economic activity imaginable. That way there is a constant need for businesses to keep that fiat on hand and do their accounting with that fiat.
Lol, obviously. Cheering them on as they shoot themselves in the foot
What political system could not be accused of this? Heck my small town is like that.
Schengen and the entire construct of the internal market being one of the main advantages.
1. As a non resident alien, you are subject to US tax on business income if you are “engaged in a trade or business in the United States“, short “ETBUS”.
2. You are ETBUS only if two things are true: (i) You have at least one “dependent agent” in the US. Dependent agents are employees or companies that work almost exclusively for you. And (ii) that dependent agent does something substantial to further your business in the US. Purely administrative jobs are not included under this rule.
3. Finally, if you can benefit from an applicable tax treaty, then you’re only subject to US tax if (in addition to being ETBUS) you operate in the US through a “permanent establishment” (e.g. an office or other fixed place of business). If you don’t meet those conditions, you are not (automatically) subject to US tax on your business.
Even if the LLC generates income in the US, by offering services or selling products into the US, that income is not taxed in the US.
> No single country can do this
I don't understand. If America already has a >15% tax rate, then it already abides by these rules. America is not a tax haven.
Nobody here seems to understand that this is not about taxes but rather about re-shoring trade power back to the Western world (which is why it concerns the EU the most). EU/US and other developed countries offloaded a part of their industries 20-30 years ago to under-developing countries to save up on some costs.
These countries (evil 0% tax countries) reduced taxes, wages and regulation to attract these offshores companies. Not because these countries like to play games, but because that's their only attraction point. And here we are, 30 years later or something like that, and the EU/US have lost a significant portion of their industrial base.
Now, they want it back. Either because they have a high unemployment rate (ie: France, Italy) and they have actually people who can do these jobs; or because they think the balance has swift too much in favor of these "international" companies and zero-tax countries. Some of them have become too powerful and one of them even downright dangerous to the world order.
Of course, I'm not holding my breath for the "developing" world. It still lacks lots of the infrastructure and many key industries that the EU/US can pressure with. The place to look at will be South East Asia. Europe seems to have lost here to US/Japan and China. I think Europe is going to come to a dark realization real soon. The US might emerge, again ugh, as the winner. China is hated by pretty much all its neighbors.
If you want an example of tax haven, Montana's a better bet.
Delaware is popular to incorporate in for legal reasons. It is not a tax shelter.
Another example is leveraging the secrecy provided by states such as South Dakota, Nevada, Delaware, etc. via anonymous shell companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_as_a_tax_haven
If there was a tax hike on my business, I'd automatically hike prices by 15%. This is what businesses are supposed to do. You buy shoes for your shoe store, you mark up the price, you can't sell them for what you bought them for. You hire an extra person, you raise the price of your goods or services. Oil prices go up? Gas stations raise the price of a gallon of gasoline. You have to pay extra taxes, you raise the price of your goods or services. It's always the customer who pays that extra 15% tax. It has to be that way, how else could it be?
Generally, it seems like a way to collect more revenue from the population while hiding it as an indirect tax. And it seems a bit like a regressive tax that hits everyone. The fact that they want it to be global makes me feel that they don’t want to compete with other countries that may have “better” economic policies -— whatever that would mean.
Here are the details: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/taxation/tax-incentives-and-t...
There is a saying in Poland: "The difference between <<justice>> and <<social justice>> is the same as the difference between <<a chair>> and <<an electric chair>>.
I wish we would actually listen to the those countries, when it comes to topics like socialism and communism. Though I suspect the Western European countries need to taste that themselves first to be able to understand what that means.
Are you saying it’s like communism?
This is the inherent problem of the EU, from both a social and economic standpoint; the member countries lose their competitive advantages over other countries because the socialistic EU bureaucrats can't handle any one country a) having any type of competitive advantage over another and b) not conforming to what they want.
A large purpose of the EU is to remove those trade barriers to make the economy more efficient. Of course some countries figure out how to take advantage of the single market using regulatory arbitrage, quickly entering a race to the bottom. Thus the EU is becoming the regulator in a lot of (non-tax) areas to prevent this. This is just the next logical step in this regard.
It’s worth noting that any EU rules on taxation are decided with unanimous consensus. No country here has to do anything against their will.
They might struggle to trust anybody else who talks about ‘love’.
But that doesn’t mean that other people who use the word ‘love’ are secret abusers.
It gets better, in the USSR until the early 70s the peasants were not even allowed to leave their villages. Technically, they were simply not issued passports which were required to register themselves to live in a town.
I bet nobody in your family was born within the reach of the Commies. In places such as the US the people have always been free to go if they felt marginalized. To another state or even abroad without asking the government for permission. So you fail to conceptualize what it means when the Socialists come to power.
And this particular one works just fine if you reverse the adjectives. After all, the justice system is generally the one responsible for executing people. It does tend to apply itself in a rather... Unjust way - but that's just one of life's little ironies.
If you're asking people to listen, you're going to need to actually express your arguments, instead of vaguely gesticulating in the general direction of a 'Four legs good, two legs better' poster.
When they start talking about things like Laffer curves again, and stop trying to turn the clock back on things like marriage and contraception, then it will stop being an appropriate moniker.
The main problem is this idea that a bunch of people on the liberal side of the Western world can create "global goals" and try to strong arm the rest of the world into following, which then leads to the inevitable outrage and disappointment when the rest of the world does not follow. And yet it never seems to happen in the other direction -- e.g. Africa deciding on global rules and then trying to force Europe to follow them, assuming they have a right to set global goals. The global goals only flow in one direction.
The idea that corporate tax policy is something that countries outside of the EU have actually thought of, and are doing their best to address in their own way, and for their own purpose, is something that never occurs to these self-described "global planners" who are in reality deeply provincial and trapped in their own micro-culture.
It is also something that people on the other side of this debate have thought of, which is one of the reasons not to tax corporations at all, but to tax those who receive the profits of corporations and that are domiciled in a particular tax jurisdiction. There is a lot of self-contradictory results when you try to tax the business separately from the owner of the business -- for example, a corporation can deduct interest payments but not dividend or share repurchases, when all three are basically the same thing, and a corporation has the option of doing all three. So this incentivizes corporations to take on debt, which then promotes financial fragility. Lots of distortions happen in a vain fight against "tax loopholes", when the real problem is that you are trying to tax the company separately from the owners.
So then you say, "I agree that trying to define 'profits' is prone to tax loopholes, so I will tax corporate revenue". Good idea! But then you will penalize business that have high expenses, e.g. a retail store that buys an item and sells it for a 20% markup would be driven out of business by a 15% tax on sales. So you say, "I will tax revenue net of input prices". And all of a sudden you have a value added tax, which is a form of sales tax, which is regressive. And then people complain about that regressivity and say "we should be taxing income instead", which was my original point!
So you keep chasing your tail because you are making decisions without really thinking things through, much like the decision for the EU to cavalierly set "global goals" even as it's relative importance is rapidly shrinking, even as Asia is pretty much ignoring all these goals because they are following their own interests and don't care about EU global goals.
These things have a way of scope creeping.
Edit: about $27,000[1].
[1]: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1861?amount=800
> The Revenue Act of 1913 ... established a one percent tax on income above $3,000 per year; the tax affected approximately three percent of the population.
Put another way: you can't tax destitute people (at least not for long, and not without losing your head), but can absolutely can tax the average American household in 2021[1].
[1]: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...
When (or if) they protest new measures, they're gaslit as if their concerns are hyperbolic and that scope creep isn't a thing that happens.
Fauci and others admitted to intentionally misleading people. In particular, I'm thinking of when they were trotting out the % of the population that would need to be vaccinated, which crept up from 60% to over 85, before they stopped talking numbers altogether.[0]
Now, you've got people who were already predisposed to mistrust authority who will flat-out disbelieve anything that comes out of the CDC, even if the CDC told them the sky was blue.