Reuters:
President Barack Obama vowed on Monday to overhaul tax policies that he said reward companies for shifting U.S. jobs overseas and that allow wealthy people to evade taxes using offshore accounts.
The White House estimates the plan would save $210 billion over the next decade.
In one proposal businesses are poised to fight, Obama would tighten tax-code provisions that allow firms to defer paying taxes on profits they make overseas as long as those earnings are plowed back into the foreign subsidiaries.
Dick Cheney's going to be pissed, because Halliburton moved to Dubai for this very reason. The way things are now, a corporation can set up it's "headquarters" in some third-world nation with little or no taxation and skip out on paying US taxes. These "world corporate headquarters" are often just a PO box and a small staff. It's clearly a tax dodge.
Still, that doesn't stop the ones benefitting from this huge loophole from complaining. "[A] letter, signed by 200 companies and trade groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the firms would not be on a level playing field with international rivals, many of which are not required to pay taxes at home on overseas entities," Reuters reports. "Pfizer, Oracle, Microsoft Corp, Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric Co were among the firms that signed the letter."
That's really the argument you want to go with here? That if this loophole is closed, freakin' Microsoft will die off? Really?
I'm just dying to see which wingnuts start echoing that argument.
