EXPOSED: Corp Taxes Are NOT High, U.S. Corps “world leaders in global tax avoidance strategies”

[marmar]

from the Working Life blog:


EXPOSED: Corp Taxes Are NOT High, U.S. Corps “world leaders in global tax avoidance strategies”
Posted on 19 August 2014


I couldn’t help the “EXPOSED” start to the headline because, actually, this is no surprise. Citizens for Tax Justice has been making this case for a very long time (including here, just as one example). But, here’s another piece of evidence to try to undo that hard-wired, decades-long rhetorical nonsense about corporate taxes being too high in the U.S.

In an academic article, reported yesterday in The New York Times (and kudos for that), entitled “Competitiveness” Has Nothing to Do With It”, Edward D. Kleinbard of the USC Gould School of Law writes (and you gotta love the accessible kick-off):

In the movie Night After Night, a young and naïve coat check girl admires Mae West’s jewelry. “Goodness,” says the woman, “what beautiful diamonds!” – to which Mae West replies, “Goodness had nothing to do with it.”And so it is with the recent wave of corporate inversion transactions.2

Despite the claims of corporate apologists, international business “competitiveness” has nothing to do with the reasons for these deals.

And:

Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan, a pharmaceutical manufacturer that is pursuing an inversion into a Dutch firm, effectively spoke for many other chief executives when she recently gave an interview describing herself as entering into the inversion deal only “reluctantly.”5 In her telling, she has abandoned hope that Congress will overhaul the Code to make U.S. companies “more competitive,” and therefore must pursue a tax-driven redomiciliation in the Netherlands against her patriotic instincts, and even though (and here is a point that Ms. Bresch forgot to mention) the merger will subject her firm’s taxable owners to capital gains tax. But all this is a false narrative: U.S. multinationals’ “competitiveness” arguments are almost entirely fact-free.

Well, he meant to say: they lie. I invite you to read the entirety of his discussion of “stateless income” but the upshot:

In the international arena, U.S. multinational firms have established themselves as world leaders in global tax avoidance strategies, through the generation of stateless income. The result is that many well-known US multinationals today enjoy single-digit effective tax rates on their foreign income, and effective tax rates on their worldwide income far below the nominal 35 percent federal corporate tax rate

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- See more at: http://www.workinglife.org/2014/08/19/exposed-corp-taxes-are-not-high-u-s-corps-world-leaders-in-global-tax-avoidance-strategies/#sthash.ezRNdERg.dpuf

[CurtEastPoint]

1. Joe Manchin (D-sort of-WV) is dad of Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan

no, not much conflict there.

[Baitball Blogger]

2. The fact that we're dumping excess combat supplies in

police departments across the nations suggests that our taxes are already too high.

[rickyhall]

4. No. It means our defense contractors and the politicians they own are

COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTROL!

[Baitball Blogger]

5. Well, the smart thing to do in those cases is tighten the military budget.

You know, at some point we have to recognize that this dumping of urban warfare supplies were all part of an intentional plan.

[Scuba]

3. Shocking! No one could have predicted that!

[pansypoo53219]

6. CEO pay is a far higher tax on the body politic. crapitalism.