Free Republic

If you’re looking to move from Miami to Canada, as Burger King Worldwide is, chances are excellent that your motive is something other than the weather. The word “inversion” has entered the popular vocabulary, describing a tax-driven corporate merger in which a U.S. firm acquires an overseas company and then relocates its legal domicile to that firm’s home tax jurisdiction. The purpose of this is in no small part to escape the onerous U.S. corporate income tax. That’s what Burger King is looking to do by acquiring beloved Canadian doughnut chain Tim Hortons, which is based in Ontario. A number...

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is urging consumers to boycott Burger King over reports that the fast food chain is eyeing a tax-cutting move to Canada. Brown, an outspoken corporate critic, said people hankering for a burger should head to Wendy’s or White Castle, two Ohio-based chains that aren’t looking to shrink their tax bill via a so-called “corporate inversion.” “Burger King’s decision to abandon the United States means consumers should turn to Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers or White Castle sliders,” he said in a statement. “Burger King has always said ‘Have it Your Way’; well my way is to support...

Tax Reform: A new report finds several states that helped elect President Obama are doing something he won't — implementing pro-growth tax policies to get their economies moving. Is the White House paying attention? You wouldn't expect a solidly blue state like Maryland — which hasn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan — to be cutting taxes for the rich. But in their last legislative session, Maryland lawmakers passed a plan to raise the estate tax exemption almost fivefold over the next five years, according to the latest annual "Rich States, Poor States" report from the American Legislative...

With Congress on August recess after failing to agree on a plan to help fix the country’s pressing immigration problems, President Obama is poised to take matters in his own hands with executive actions. Whether the president will act without Congress on immigration and other pressing issues has as emerged as a thorny political question. Critics argue he is intent on violating the Constitution to achieve his political agenda, while supporters say he is being forced into action because of the Capitol Hill dysfunction. Speculation that Obama will act during August recess is not unfounded. He has issued at least...

Obama has called “for an end to a corporate loophole that allows companies to avoid federal taxes by shifting their tax domiciles overseas in deals known as “inversions.” Such as statement shows the utter ineptitude that Obama has for understanding a) what inversion actually is and b) how his policies are the cause.

US taxation of corporate profits is the highest in the world, and hobbles American companies competing on world markets, thereby costing American jobs. Just last month, medical equipment giant Medtronic announced plans to move its headquarters from Minneapolis to Dublin, via the acquisition of a company located there, and taking the new company’s domicile as its own. Now, it is being followed by a company run by the daughter of a US senator. Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times: Heather Bresch grew up around politics. Her father is Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia and a...

Why do we tax corporations? No, seriously — why? If you’re like most people and all New Democrats, your response will be “because that’s where the money is,” or some variant thereon. Corporations have lots of money, the thinking runs, and are unlikely to mind if the government helps itself to some of it. And since they don’t vote, it doesn’t much matter if they do mind. An economist, on the other hand, would point out that, one way or another, all of the income earned by a corporation finds its way back to the people who financed it, whether...

There’s a growing, bipartisan consensus that the berserk complexity of the U.S. tax code stymies job growth. Our tax code has grown to be 25 times the length of "War and Peace,” notes Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union. Lowering corporate tax rates and simplifying the maniacally-convoluted tax code is slowly catching fire. S&P Capital IQ has provided an estimate on just what would happen to the U.S. economy if the effective corporate tax rate paid by S&P 500 companies dropped to Switzerland’s average, effective rate of 22.4% from our current 32.3%. S&P Capital IQ says...

Last August, I shared a list of companies that “re-domiciled” in other nations so they could escape America’s punitive “worldwide” tax system. This past April, I augmented that list with some commentary about whether Walgreen’s might become a Swiss-based company. And in May, I pontificated about Pfizer’s effort to re-domicile in the United Kingdom. Well, to paraphrase what Ronald Reagan said to Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential debate, here we go again. Here’s the opening few sentences from a report in the Wall Street Journal. Medtronic Inc.’s agreement on Sunday to buy rival medical-device maker Covidien COV PLC for...

My daydream is to lock all members of Congress and the president in a classroom with a big whiteboard and not let them out until they can pass a basic test in public finance. The first thing I'd teach them about is tax incidence — who really bears the burden of a tax. Our politicians seem to think the burden of taxes falls on those who they require to pay, as in remit or transmit or hand over or submit or mail in, the tax. This is entirely off base. Who bears the burden of (is hurt by) a tax...

It was a former top Democratic staffer on the House Budget Committee, not some Kemp-Laffer supply-sider, who first convinced me that one of the most dynamic and worthwhile tax reforms, and one of the least costly (to the federal government’s revenues), would be the complete elimination of the corporate income tax. Now comes Laurence Kotlikoff, a well-respected economist, usually a critic of the Lafferites and the tea partiers, to urge again — in the New York Times, no less — that we jettison the whole corporate income tax. Kotlikoff is right: The corporate income tax is a drain on...

President Barack Obama on Tuesday offered congressional Republicans a new corporate tax cut and jobs spending package he said might “help break through some of the political logjam in Washington,” only to have GOP lawmakers immediately throw cold water on the idea. The announcement and quick rejection underscored how elusive common ground is between the Democratic White House and Republicans in Congress on fiscal issues. The divide was particularly stark on the corporate tax proposal given that both parties generally have supported overhauling the code for businesses, though the White House and Republicans have differed on specifics. … The U.S....

House Speaker John Boehner has already thrown a wrench into President Barack Obama's latest "grand bargain" offer — just a few hours after details of it began trickling out, and just five hours before Obama is set to deliver a speech detailing the plan in Tennessee. The gist of Obama's grand bargain is a plan to cut the corporate tax rate, while using billions of dollars in revenue generated in business tax overhaul to fund a job-creation program. In a statement, Boehner spokesman Michael Steel shot down the idea, marveling that it left small businesses "and American families behind." "The...

I’ve relentlessly complained that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate among all developed nations. And if you look at all the world’s countries, our status is still very dismal. According to the the Economist, we have the second highest corporate tax rate, exceeded only by the United Arab Emirates. But some people argue that the statutory tax rate can be very misleading because of all the other policies that impact the actual tax burden on companies. That’s a very fair point, so I was very interested to see that a couple of economists at a German think tank put together a “tax...

The May jobs report shows that the American economy added 175,000 positions. Positive employment growth is welcome news, of course. But May's gains weren't big enough to make a dent in the national joblessness rate, which actually ticked up to 7.6%. Meanwhile, revenue at most U.S. companies continues to grow as firms expand operations and accumulate capital. Yet this progress hasn't precipitated a proportional expansion in hiring. This lag has long been a source of frustration on Capitol Hill. Perhaps yet another month of anemic job growth will actually jolt policymakers into action. The best way for Congress and the...

Politicians are having fun slapping around big corporations for supposedly not paying enough taxes. In this country, Apple is the current target, while in Europe it’s Google, Amazon, and Starbucks, according to the Washington Post today. But there is an elephant in the room that the many reporters and politicians blustering over the issue have been too ideologically blind to see: There is no obvious harm being done by today’s corporate tax avoidance. The first thing to note is that when investment flows through tax havens, it’s not clear that it causes any economic distortions. The Washington Post story...

At a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, federal lawmakers hauled in America’s most successful corporation to investigate why it had so precisely followed the laws those solons have passed. The targeting of Apple should be no particular surprise, in Congress’s crass calculus: True, even if reducing one’s tax burden and shifting profits overseas were a crime, Apple would probably not be the first company to investigate for such behavior — as chief executive Tim Cook pointed out, Apple paid $6 billion in corporate-income taxes to the U.S. Treasury in 2012, which is enough to run the entire Transportation Security Administration...

Apple Inc. paid little to no corporate income tax to any national government on tens of billions of dollars in overseas income over the past four years, Senate investigators found, a revelation that fuels the debate over whether the U.S. tax code needs an overhaul. The disclosure follows a lengthy examination of the technology giant's tax practices by the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is expected to air its findings at a hearing on Tuesday. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook is preparing to testify at the hearing, and is expected to propose changes to a tax code that...

I’ve made the point before that the United States foolishly imposes the highest corporate tax rate of all developed nations. But that obviously means it is theoretically possible for there to be a nation in the developing world that has a higher corporate tax rates. Well, according to this map produced by the Financial Times, there is one nation with a worse corporate tax regime. It’s not China, which is nominally still a communist nation (though apparently with more of a pro-business mentality than the United States). It’s not Venezuela or Argentina, corrupt and thuggish Latin American nations. And it’s...

There has been a bruising battle over how much America’s largest corporations should pay in taxes, especially as the size of the federal budget deficit grows. While on paper the federal corporate tax rate is 35%, companies usually pay far less than that because of loopholes and subsidies. That has caused some activists to say that companies should pay the full rate regardless of special accounting charges, or if some revenue is earned overseas. Still, several huge American companies pay the 35% rate, and because of their size, the amount is well into the billions of dollars. The companies paying...