Prescription for Poverty: Drug Companies as Tax Dodgers, Price Gougers, and Influence Peddlers
Pharmaceutical companies claim to bear their fair share of taxes, but their financial statements tell a different story.
New Study Confirms Offshore Earnings are Flowing into Stock Buybacks, Not Jobs and Investments
For years, corporations stockpiled profits offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes, with the sum growing to $2.6 trillion by 2017. Corporate apologists suggested that this cache was necessary because the corporate tax rate was too high, and they asserted that if the United States lowered its tax rate, corporations would repatriate those profits, pay taxes, invest in workers and we’d all win.
In 2016, then candidate Trump claimed there is as much as $5 trillion overseas and a tax break on those earnings would cause “all of this money to come back into our country” and “turn America into a magnet for new jobs.”
Based on previous experience with a repatriation holiday in 2004, critics argued that another repatriation tax break would be a major windfall to corporations that would enrich shareholders and accomplish little else.
In the end, corporations and their allies got their way.
U.S. Should Not Favor Foreign over U.S. Profits: Tax Multinationals the Same as Wholly Domestic Companies
The new tax law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), changed the tax system from one in which U.S. corporations paid taxes equally on all their profits to one in which they pay lower taxes on profits booked outside the United States. By lowering the tax rate on foreign profits, the tax code now encourages U.S. corporations to move U.S. jobs and profits offshore.
Sven Giegold: Global Tax Cooperation Remains Crucial
Giegold is a member of a parliamentary delegation which has just concluded a fact finding trip to Washington on what the US is doing to combat financial crime.
The delegation from the economic and monetary affairs committee was in Washington and New York to meet representatives from the US Treasury, the Institute of International Bankers (IIB) and the Federal Reserve Board (FRB).
Just the FACTs: July 18, 2018
After 2 years of bipartisan negotiations, without warning or fanfare, the leadership of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee stripped beneficial ownership provisions out of a bipartisan anti-money laundering bill and planned a Committee vote.
A decision was made to drop beneficial ownership because it was thought to be controversial and a stripped down bill would “pass easily.” However, as FACT’s executive director describes in this op-ed in the American Banker, that was simply not the case.
ITEP Report: Understanding and Fixing the New International Corporate Tax System
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) radically changed the international tax system. It slashed taxes on corporate income, both domestic and foreign. It encouraged U.S. multinational corporations to shift jobs, profits, and tangible property abroad, and keep intangibles home. This report describes the new international tax system—and its many gaps—and also provides a road map for how to fix these gaps and surveys recent legislative approaches.