Obama Seeks to Curb Foreign Tax Havens - NYTimes.com:
At issue are tax laws that were originally intended to prevent multinational corporations from being double-taxed, by the United States and by foreign countries, by allowing companies to defer reporting their foreign income to the Internal Revenue Service and to get tax credits in the United States for foreign taxes paid.
Economists are divided over whether higher taxes would give corporations incentives to move jobs overseas or impair economic growth at home. In the coming debate, both Mr. Obama and the business lobby will claim that their way will save jobs.
The top corporate tax rate is 35 percent, but the Treasury Department estimated that in 2004, the most recent year for which data is available, American multinationals paid $16 billion in taxes on $700 billion in foreign income — an effective rate of 2.3 percent.
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