Think it can't happen? The stage is being set to negotiate and bargain on another piece of the President's defeated jobs bill. Funny thing, Republicans aren't alone in supporting the idea. Three Democratic Senators and 10 Democratic Congress people are co-sponsors.
What a boon to corporate shareholders and executives in 2004, and instead of creating jobs, Pfizer actually laid off thousands. This "new-trust-us-this-time" deal is being sold as one that will create 1-2 million jobs. Doesn't it seem like $1 trillion almost tax free dollars should create more jobs than that? Oh yeah, forgot about those poor shareholders and executives who will need to siphon off their billions.
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843 companies brought around $362 billion home from overseas. More than half the benefits went to just 15 companies. And just five — Pfizer, Merck, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson and IBM — retrieved $88 billion, a fourth of the funds returned.
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All told, 58 organizations and companies listed “repatriation” on their disclosure forms as an issue on which they were lobbying through the first nine months of 2011. While these companies spent at least $71.2 million on lobbying during this period, because of the way lobbying is disclosed, it is impossible to tell exactly how much was spent on what issue.
WIN-affiliated companies such as Pfizer ($7,340,000 overall), Qualcomm ($3,880,000 overall), Microsoft ($3,592,000 overall), Apple ($1,350,000 overall) and Oracle ($1,150,000 overall), among others, spent at least some money to lobby on the issue.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/66668.html#ixzz1br7rxGUr?duA bill in the House would tax repatriated earnings at 5.25 percent, a fraction of the usual rate of 35 percent; a bill in the Senate would cut the rate to 8.75 percent, or 5.25 percent for companies that added jobs.
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Yet, in the warped politics of Washington, a second tax holiday is a distinct possibility. Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat of New York, and other Democratic senators have floated the idea that a tax holiday could be used to establish an infrastructure bank. They are focused on the short-run revenue gain from a tax holiday and playing down the substantial revenue loss over time. Mr. Schumer says he would not support a rate as low as 5.25 percent, but even a higher rate would be a big revenue loser. (Schumer supports an 8.75% tax; Senator Barbara Boxer is also one of the Senate Democrats who support this tax giveaway to corporations.)
Similarly, the bipartisan deficit reduction supercommittee, reportedly hamstrung in its quest for trillion-dollar budget cuts, might also try to use the short-run revenue gain from a tax holiday to mask the depth of spending cuts. Or Congressional Republicans may demand passage of a tax holiday in exchange for extending federal unemployment benefits, which expire at the end of the year.
The White House has rightly opposed another “one-time” tax holiday, but politics are pulling in the other direction. Unless President Obama leads the fight, this wrongheaded policy is too likely to become the law of the land. The evidence is there. A corporate tax holiday won’t create more jobs. What it will do is raise the deficit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/opinion/no-tax-holiday.html?_r=1?du