Free Republic

As with so many other things, when it comes to finding ways to pad the government’s pockets, President Obama prefers to skip over that whole Congress thing. Just ask Josh Earnest! According to him, forcing corporations to pay more in taxes through executive action is an option the president would like to keep on his table:

Posturing as champion of needed public investments and fairness, President Obama wants new taxes on the overseas earnings of American businesses. ... The United States is virtually alone by taxing the overseas profits of its multinationals when those are repatriated. ... Now the president wants an immediate 14 percent tax levy on those assets to raise about $500 billion and to impose a 19 percent tax on future earnings to finance infrastructure investments. Much of the $2.1 trillion in non-repatriated corporate overseas profits is not parked in foreign bank accounts. Rather, it is already invested by firms like GE and...

Finding a way to prevent the next Burger King from fleeing the U.S. (to avoid paying the highest corporate tax rates in the world) appears to rank fairly high on the priority list for both Republicans and Democrats. But the two parties couldn’t be farther apart on the appropriate policy to end these so-called “unpatriotic” tax inversions. No strangers to coercion, the Obama administration via Treasury Secretary Jack Lew recently announced that through the use of executive action, “the agency would change several tax rules to stop companies from buying smaller, foreign firms and then moving out of the U.S.”...

A senior Democratic tax writer said Friday that the Obama administration could take unilateral action targeting offshore tax deals before Congress leaves town for the midterm elections. Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) said that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told a group of House Ways and Means Democrats on Wednesday that the White House would roll out administrative actions against the recent influx of so-called inversions “when they’re ready.” “That could be next week,” Levin said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. Lew has only said that the administration would decide in the “very near future” how to respond...

It's official. Chrysler has now wholly-merged with Italian auto maker, Fiat. It had taken a bit over five years for Fiat to gain total control of the bailed out, once-American Chrysler Corporation. Back in June of 2009, President Obama gifted (payment was made in the form of "technology") an initial 20% stake in Chrysler to Fiat as part of his orchestrated auto bailout process. Fiat parlayed that into full ownership and is now showing its gratitude to the American taxpayers who helped fund the deal by relocating Chrysler's headquarters to London ; a move which will lessen the company's...

The nominal corporate-income-tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, the highest in the developed world. That’s the on-paper rate. The effective corporate-income-tax rate — i.e., the actual rate — is . . . a matter of some dispute, but Martin A. Sullivan, a highly regarded economist specializing in taxation, puts it around 28 percent. Others have estimated the rate to be much lower: A Government Accountability (ha!) Office study put the figure at about 13 percent. Let’s put it at 0.00 percent. In reality, the effective corporate tax rate varies substantially from firm to firm and from industry...

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...