On 'tax inversion', Apple, and what makes a 'U.S.' company

Continuing on a pet theme of mine, I want my readers to consider just what is a "U.S. company" (for tax purposes). What comes to your mind?  Do you even know what the formal definition is? Does that definition meet your moral-reasonable expectations of an American company?

Pearlstein objects to those American companies that want to have their cake and eat it to, that want...

...all the rights and privileges of being an American company without the full complement of responsibilities that go along with it.

You want the peace and security guaranteed by a muscular military and intelligence apparatus that make it possible for you to operate and market in all the advanced economies of the world. You want the world’s most sophisticated and enforceable patent system to protect your intellectual property. You want a fair and efficient judicial system to enforce contracts.

You want a well-educated workforce to design and make your products, based on basic research done through an extensive network of government-funded institutes and laboratories. You want modern ports and highways and airports to ship your products to market, and an efficient border operation to speed them through customs.

You want an honest, efficient financial system that can provide you with cheap and plentiful capital. You demand a professional, credible regulatory agency that can expeditiously evaluate your products and ensure customers that they are safe and effective. And you insist on government-funded health care for the poor, the elderly and the disabled that will pay you more for your devices than any other country in the world.

In related news that my fellow Americans are probably not paying attention, the European Commission is investigating Ireland, and other known EU tax havens for their soft treatment of Apple, Google and other well-known US companies. 

Now, the EU isn't trying to help the USA collect more tax from these "American" companies, no sir.  They are threatening potential punishments for handing out what amount to subsidies to home businesses -- an unfair trade practice that decreases the competitiveness of other EU states. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out!....

An open letter to Medtronic on what it means to be an American company

By Steven Pearlstein

June 20, 2014 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1rg2HK9

Summers: Piketty is right about the past, but the future is ours

I'm tired so I'm not going to analyze now in depth Larry Summers' analysis of Piketty's seminal, once-in-a-generation economic treatise, I'm just gonna say what Summers says Piketty's data should lead us to believe [emphasis mine]:

Perhaps the best way of thinking about Piketty’s wealth tax is less as a serious proposal than as a device for pointing up two truths. First, success in combating inequality will require addressing the myriad devices that enable those with great wealth to avoid paying income and estate taxes. It is sobering to contemplate that in the United States, annual estate and gift tax revenues come to less than 1 percent of the wealth of just the 400 wealthiest Americans. With respect to taxation, as so much else in life, the real scandal is not the illegal things people do—it is the things that are legal. And second, such efforts are likely to require international cooperation if they are to be effective in a world where capital is ever more mobile. The G-20 nations working through the OECD have begun to address these issues, but there is much more that can be done. Whatever one’s views on capital mobility generally, there should be a consensus on much more vigorous cooperative efforts to go after its dark side—tax havens, bank secrecy, money laundering, and regulatory arbitrage.

Beyond taxation, however, there is, one would hope, more than Piketty acknowledges that can be done to make it easier to raise middle-class incomes and to make it more difficult to accumulate great fortunes without requiring great social contributions in return. Examples include more vigorous enforcement of antimonopoly laws, reductions in excessive protection for intellectual property in cases where incentive effects are small and monopoly rents are high, greater encouragement of profit-sharing schemes that benefit workers and give them a stake in wealth accumulation, increased investment of government pension resources in riskier high-return assets, strengthening of collective bargaining arrangements, and improvements in corporate governance. Probably the two most important steps that public policy can take with respect to wealth inequality are the strengthening of financial regulation to more fully eliminate implicit and explicit subsidies to financial activity, and an easing of land-use restrictions that cause the real estate of the rich in major metropolitan areas to keep rising in value.

I'm no fan of Summers, yet his last two prescriptions are, I daresay, things you will never hear discussed in depth on Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN or elsewhere. Wherefore the lib'rul media, indeed!

The only thing I will criticize now, is Summers' argument that "productivity" and "entrepreneurship" explain the outsized gains of U.S. managers. A look at average CEO pay among U.S. corporations and others gives the lie to this argument.  Nobody is arguing that U.S. CEOs are that much better, yet they earn orders of magnitude more than their workers.

As wonkish and un-sexy as it may be, I've talked about this before and will continue to talk about the OECD's effort to fight BEPS (tax base erosion and profit shifting) among global corporations. This is indeed a global problem, not just a U.S. problem, and the U.S. cannot hope to solve it in isolation, but must nevertheless play a leading role in ending this global "race to the bottom."

Thomas Piketty Is Right About the Past and Wrong About the Future

By Lawrence Summers

May 16, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/thomas-piketty-is-right-about-the-past-and-wrong-about-the-future/370994/