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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (187426)	12/16/2015 10:20:23 AM
From: TideGlider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224749

It is simply amazing how stupid the average voter is not to even give these criminals a second look. The world is being slipped out from under them by a bunch of carpet bagging thieves like Hillary, Gore, Soros etc etc

To: lorne who wrote (187426)	12/16/2015 10:24:40 AM
From: TideGlider	Respond to of 224749

Hillary’s Patriot ActHer answers to corporate inversions are more rules and an exit tax. ENLARGE Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at the University of Minnesota on December 15 in Minneapolis. Photo: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press Dec. 15, 2015 7:27 p.m. ET 76 COMMENTS Amid the melodrama of the Republican brawl for President, Hillary Clinton’s march to the Democratic nomination has been an afterthought. That’s too bad because week after week the anointed one is offering an economic agenda that is notably to the left of President Obama. Her latest proposal came last week with an effort to respond to the spate of tax “inversions,” or decisions to move U.S. corporate headquarters overseas to avoid America’s punishing tax code. Mrs. Clinton, who has hit up so many companies for donations to the Clinton Foundation, is doing progressive penance by denouncing Pfizer, PFE -0.19 % the U.S. drug company seeking a $160 billion merger with Irish-based Allergan AGN 0.47 % that would leave it an Irish company. Companies like Pfizer, Mrs. Clinton says, are trying to get out of paying “their fair share.” By “fair share,” she means money that “we” (read: the government) should be spending in the U.S. to revive, say, manufacturing. At a campaign rally in Waterloo, Iowa, she put it this way: “This is not only about fairness. This is about patriotism.” The Obama Treasury has tried to block inversions with new regulations, but Mrs. Clinton would go further. Today the government requires that 20% of the new company be held by foreigners. Mrs. Clinton wants Congress to jack up the required foreign stake to 50%. She also wants Treasury to stop these new foreign parent companies from lending to their new U.S. subsidiaries. As it stands now, the U.S. company can write off the interest on the debt at higher U.S. tax rates while these payments are taxed as income in the lower-taxed foreign land of the parent company. This should require an act of Congress, but Mrs. Clinton suggests she would expand on the bad Obama habit of rewriting the law via executive action. If all that fails, as it probably would, Mrs. Clinton wants to impose an “exit tax.” These companies would be forced to pay taxes on foreign earnings that, under current law, they do not pay until they are repatriated back to America. Keep in mind that these profits have already been taxed in the countries where they were made. Mrs. Clinton offers a lot of numbers on behalf of her proposals, mostly about the billions she claims they will yield in tax revenue. But the one number she doesn’t mention is the one at the root of these moves: 35%. That’s the U.S. federal corporate tax rate, the highest in the developed world, and the burden is nearly 40% if you include the average state corporate tax rate. The corporate tax rate is not the only reason companies leave America. But high rates create a vicious policy cycle, because governments that try to sustain their high rates in the teeth of global competition inevitably end up spending resources adding regulation after regulation in an effort to close off the exits. It doesn’t occur to top Democrats to do what a British Labour government did a few years ago amid its own inversion problem. As the Tax Foundation has noted, though the U.K. had cut its corporate rate during the Thatcher years, in 2008 it still had one of the highest rates in Europe. Like their American cousins, the Brits also taxed companies on what they earned worldwide. In 2009 the Labor government moved to a territorial system, taxing companies only on profits made in the U.K. The following year the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat government took reform further by adopting a series of rate cuts that has brought the British corporate tax rate down to 20%. Now instead of British companies leaving Britain for other nations, foreign companies are coming to Britain. There’s a lesson here about the good things that happen when you make your country more attractive to capital investment. After seven years of Obamanomics and flat wages, the U.S. desperately needs a debate about how to reignite the American growth machine. Mrs. Clinton is offering more of the same, and Republican voters should be asking candidates for an alternative if they ever get serious about wanting to retake the White House.