“In 2004, Congress passed the American Jobs Creation Act, which permitted countries to bring back profits from offshore one time at a reduced rate — paying 5.25 percent instead of 35 percent. And companies brought back about $312 billion that qualified for the break, and there’s a fair amount of literature that shows very little job creation went on as a result of that. And most of that money was used to buy back stock. And companies right now are lobbying for a repeat of that break.”
On remaining competitive
“The U.S. and other countries need to create climates that are conducive to business. That’s absolutely true. As long as this system exists where companies have the ability to shift profits, they’re going to take advantage of that. I guess the question is: Do we want to have a system where your taxable income has so little relation to where the real-world economic activity takes place and, more broadly, the question it raises about the fairness of the tax system — the result of this is that it shifts the tax burden to the people that don’t have the ability to do this, i.e., the 99 percent of Americans who don’t have access to sophisticated tax advisers and also to the companies that are not multinational.”
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So much for the “rich provide the jobs” hogwash. Trickle-down is a HUGE FAILURE.
