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簡介:Money goes in. More money comes out.
參與方式:全文聽寫
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the Freedom to Invest Act
Raquel Alexander
Susan Scholz
Because people that weren't doing this before, are doing it now; and the ones that were doing it, are doing even more.
What do you make of that?
I make of that, that everyone agreed, basically, that it wasn't gonna be a one-time provision. They knew it was coming again and that they would be able to bring some of this money back home.
And, in fact, in May of last year the Freedom to Invest Act of 2011 was introduced in the House, setting up a one-time tax rate of five percent for offshore earnings. In October, a bill doing the same thing was introduced in the Senate.
Now, when it comes to the corporate income tax, there is a healthy academic debate about how high it should be. Many experts say we'd be better off if corporations paid a lower income tax - the money they saved on taxes they could put into investment, which would ultimately lead to more jobs.
And as it happens, Raquel Alexander and her co-author on the study, Susan Scholz, come down on separate sides of this debate. Alexander thinks the 35 percent corporate tax rate is about where it should be. Scholz would like to see it lowered, considerably. But Scholz has a lot of problems with the way it got lowered in this case, through lobbying.
We have a situation where we, in essence, invite corporations to buy their own tax rate through lobbying; making their own deals with Congress, which I think ultimately corrupts both the companies and the politicians.
The coalition of companies lobbying for the new tax holiday has spent around $50 million so far. Companies in the coalition are estimated to have over $200 billion in profits parked offshore.