Which will the GOP Presidential candidate choose during tonight’s debate–amnesty for coporate tax dodgers or jobs?
Based on Monday’s Palmetto Freedom Forum in Columbia, the answer is sure to be amnesty for corporate tax dodgers.
The GOP candidates have all proclaimed that the way to create jobs is to offer U.S.-based multinational corporations amnesty for most or all of the taxes they owe to us if they bring back to the U.S. the profits they’ve squirreled away in bank accounts in Bermuda, Luxembourg and other offshore tax havens.
In May JP Morgan Chase estimates that there is $1.375 trillion being held in these offshore tax havens by 519 American multinational corporations like Apple ($41 billion), Microsoft ($42 billion), Cisco Systems ($38.8 billion) and Google ($40 billion).
The candidates you’ll watch on TV tonight all mistakenly believe that if we just let these corporations repatriate these profits to the U.S. and pay little (5%) or no income tax on the money, the sun will come out and jobs will sprout like spring flowers.
But we tried this “one-time” tax amnesty before in 2004 and the only winners were the shareholders and corporate execs who pocketed the windfall while actually cutting tens of thousands of American jobs. The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated that a new tax amnesty program would cost $78.7 billion in lost revenue to the U.S. Government over the ensuing decade because the multinationals would hide more money offshore waiting for the next “one-time” tax amnesty day. There will be no flowers, only weeds for the unemployed.
So tonight when each Presidential candidate calls for amnesty for these Un-American corporate tax dodgers (they’ll call it a repatriation tax holiday—doesn’t that sound like patriotic fun…a holiday!), listen to see what they’re going to do to help small business create jobs. The silence might be deafening.