Justin Fox, Columnist

Voters Don't Like Cutting Corporate Taxes

Experts -- no matter how right or how much they agree -- will not convince people in the "real world" that reform is needed.

February 13, 2017 at 6:22 PM UTC

By Justin Fox

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Cut mine first.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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On Sunday, Swiss voters rejected a reduction in corporate tax rates by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin.

Some of the factors that drove their decision were unique to Switzerland and this particular referendum. The tax change had been forced on Swiss politicians by the European Union and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which don't like the preferential treatment the country has been giving to multinational corporations with operations there. It was a complicated proposal, and Finance Minister Ueli Maurer (of the right-leaning populist Swiss People's Party) doesn't seem to have done a great job of selling it. There were ramifications related to local-government finances that, well, I'm not going to pretend to understand.