[PersonalLiberties]

WTO tells U.S. to change laws or pay up

The World Trade Organization has ruled that the United States must change its tax laws or face up to $4 billion in penalties. The ruling came after the European Union charged unfair trade practices against the U.S. for not requiring major corporations to pay tax on income earned abroad.

I know this is one of the issues that free traders get upset about and say this is why the offshore in the first place, or incorporate in Bermuda, etc. Well, because of intranational groups US cannot independatly set its tax policies.

[1rudeboy]

You might be thinking of some other issue. U.S. corporations pay income tax on world-wide income; the U.S. is virtually the only country in the world that taxes corporations in such a fashion, and it places our corporations at a terrible competitive disadvantage.

The only ways a U.S. corporation can avoid paying taxes on world-wide income are either to set-up a foreign subsidiary and not repatriate the income (in which case the I.R.S. attempts to "capture" it in other ways), or to do a corporate "inversion" and relocate its headquarters to a tax jurisdiction that does not tax world-wide income.

Just another fine example of our tax laws being counter-productive.