Not to speak for max, but that isn't his point. bush was corp tax friendly, the companies moved. why, because it has nothing to do with it. energy companies move their headquarters overseas because where is everyone drilling for oil?
I don't think it is quite that simple otherwise Houston would suffer a massive dip in population. While yes most oil is being drilled overseas but at the same time a lot of the leadership and intellectual infrastructure is here.
the headquarters consists of senior level managment though. houston is also a leader in oil field services. its a little harder to up and move these manufacturing facilities, but the senior management has a little less difficulty. the manufacturing isn't leaving, but the management is. because even these drills, guess where they eventually end up?
I don't mind at all paying taxes. I just don't like the power of the IRS and I don't like seeing their army increased.
Increasing government and the IRS = success in the minds of the liberals. They really believe that. Scary.
Cheating on his taxes with impunity and letting the 'little people' like police officers, teachers and soldiers shoulder more of the tax burden = success in the mind of bigtexxx. If they have the tax law, they should enforce it. I see parallells with the immigration debate. It is reasonably well documented that if you want to cheat on your taxes, there is a near 100% percent chance you will get away with it because the IRS doesn't have enough manpower to do more than check a token number of returns - especially when you have large amounts of income from non-payroll (W2) sources. Edit: source [rquoter] An IRS study last year concluded that the tax gap in 2001 was $345 billion. Of that, $197 billion came from underreporting on individual income tax returns and $88 billion from underreporting by corporations and the self-employed. The rest came from those not filing or not paying the proper amount. That gap narrowed to $290 billion after enforcement efforts and late payments were factored in. Still, that left the government collecting only 86 percent of the more than $2 trillion it was owed in 2001. That translated into a "surtax" of about $2,680 per household in 2001, the national taxpayer advocate said at a recent hearing of the House Budget Committee. "That is an extraordinary burden to ask our nation's compliant taxpayers to bear every year," Nina E. Olson said. [/rquoter]
Take a company like Hewlett Packard. They are a multinational company based in the United States, but their business sees no country lines. They employ hundreds of thousands of employees in the US and abroad. A significant portion of their business is done overseas. If HP sells a printer in the EU, they don't pay US taxes on that income unless they repatriate the money in the United States. I believe they DO pay EU taxes on that income though. If the US decides to tax all that income, regardless of what country it is made in, it will significantly reduce the overall income for HP. I already know what HP will do. They will lay of another 20,000 American workers, offshore more to India and China, and may, in fact move their corporate headquarters off US soil if it means saving billions of dollars in revenue from being taxed. So the net affect will be the loss of an American corporate icon, tens of thousands of jobs lost, and a new headquarters set up in some tax friendly nation that would love the thousands of jobs that it would provide. The same thing will happen to GE, IBM, Exxon Mobil, etc. The LAST thing that a huge amount of new taxes will be allowed to affect to these companies is the bottom line: simplest place to cut: employees.
Increasing corporate profits while decreasing public transparency at any cost = success in the minds of conservatives. They really believe that. Scary.
Did you ignore the part where he said they need to find ways to incentivize companies to claim income? If the company moves overseas, it wasn't much of an incentive, was it?
