alt Hacker NewsThe Switzerland model is unique in several ways, both in its history, which cannot be replicated, and in embracing of...questionable financial services.
It's unclear that the model can be replicated generally, let alone whether it should. Importantly, there may not be sufficient demand for banking services like the Swiss provide.
Your three step plan says nothing about how much should be taxed at the personal vs corporate income level, or on the gap between capital gains and labor income taxes.
I'm not arguing for higher tax revenue overall. I don't believe in that, but I also wouldn't even need to make the argument even if I believed in it.
The simpler, more defensible argument is that taxes on capital gains must be much closer to income taxes. Historically they were, even in the US, and we seemed to be fine.
The idea Switzerland's economy is dodgy or dependent on banking is an urban legend. Only 10% of Swiss GDP comes from finance at all and that includes everything, including insurance and pensions. Private banking is only a fraction of that, and private banking with anonymous accounts - which is what people tend to mean by this - was a tiny fraction of that again.
Meanwhile, financial privacy isn't inherently questionable. The USA did a big push in the 1970s to strip privacy from the financial system which until that point had been the default. That was the birth of the concept of money laundering, created as part of the war on drugs. The approach failed as drug cartels found ways to launder money cheaply enough that it wasn't a big friction for them (normal estimate, it adds ~10% to their costs). Not everyone thought that was a great tradeoff, and the Swiss numbered accounts had been used by people trying to hide from the Nazis.
At any rate, the USA forced their concept of anti-money laundering on the world (not that most countries needed the arm twisting) and Switzerland has implemented exactly the same policies as everywhere else for decades. It has no special rules with respect to banking for a long time now.
> Your three step plan says nothing about how much should be taxed at the personal vs corporate income level
It's a set of principles for answering those questions, not the full set of answers.
It's been years since I looked at this but IIRC the general agreement is that you shouldn't bother with corporate/business taxes, because they're both an indirect/inefficient way to collect tax (all taxes are paid by people in the end), and easily avoided.
It was for this reason that the designers of the EU's taxation system originally configured corporate taxation to be collected wherever the nameplate was (i.e. an arbitrary location chosen by the company). The assumption was that with time individual countries would compete the corporate tax rate to zero, fixing the underlying inefficiencies. Of course what's actually happened is some of the countries try to gang up on the others to try and force them to stop lowering taxes. It's not a stable outcome, politically.
In practice business taxes are popular because politicians view them as a way to tax citizens of foreign countries. That has bad effects too but schools either don't teach economics or don't teach it properly in most places, so there are lots of weird hacks like this where something that creates more harm than the alternative gets preferred because people can't resolve the harm to the root cause.