Obama's Proposal to Double-Tax Profits Will Kill U.S. Jobs

/PRNewswire / -- With President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner today announcing a job-killing tax increase of over $200 billion over the next ten years, Americans for Tax Reform issued the following fact sheet on the state of international and corporate taxation:

America has the highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world. The United States is tied with Japan for one very dubious honor -- having the highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world. According to the OECD, the United States has a combined marginal corporate rate of nearly 40 percent. This compares very negatively to our European competitors' average rate of 25 percent. The Republic of Ireland stands in the starkest contrast, with a corporate income tax rate of 12.5 percent. In the developing world, rates of 10 or 15 percent are commonplace.

America is one of the only developed countries that double-taxes the international profits of our own companies. If a Polish company earns a profit in France, it pays the French corporate income tax, and nothing else. But if a U.S. company earns that same profit in France, it must pay the French corporate tax and the U.S. corporate tax (minus whatever was paid to France). So not only does the U.S. impose the highest corporate rate in the world, it makes sure that this rate is applied to both domestic and international profits. This is called a "worldwide taxation system" and the U.S. is one of a tiny handful of countries that still practices it.

Recognizing the problem this creates, Congress has crafted a confusing set of exclusions, deferrals, deductions, and credits on international profits. In general, U.S. companies can avoid paying this double-tax until they repatriate the profits back to the U.S.

By seeking to take away these double-tax band-aids without lowering the corporate rate substantially or fixing the global taxation scheme, Obama's proposal will shove jobs and capital out of America and into foreign countries. Obama's budget and Congressional tax-writers have been clear -- they want companies to pay the full corporate rate as soon as the international profit is earned. In a global economy, companies don't have to take this lying down. It's a relatively simple matter for a U.S. company with an Irish subsidiary to become an Irish company with a U.S. subsidiary. The Obama plan will force thousands of companies to make this job-killing decision. Companies that export goods will soon start exporting jobs.

The U.S. should tax our companies the way the rest of the world taxes theirs -- territoriality. The rest of the developed world has figured this out: if they want to retain jobs and capital in their countries, they have to adopt territoriality. This means that companies only pay corporate income tax in the country where the profit is earned. The U.S. partially tried this in 2005, when companies were allowed to repatriate deferred foreign earnings at a 5.25% rate -- far lower than what they would have to pay otherwise. The result was a one-year infusion of $318 billion in capital to the United States, resulting in $17 billion in additional corporate income tax payments, and the creation of thousands of new jobs.

The U.S. needs to lower our corporate income tax rate to become more competitive. American employers are competing globally with Irish, British, German, etc. companies. It makes no sense to saddle our employers with the highest corporate rate in the world. At the very least, we need to lower our corporate tax rate to 25 percent or less. This simply begins to make our tax treatment of large employers somewhat comparable to our European competitors. When combined with territoriality, this move would begin to change the corporate tax culture in the U.S. from a jobs killer to a jobs magnet.

Obama's Broken Promise: No Tax Hikes on Those Making Less Than $250,000

/PRNewswire/ -- During his campaign, President Obama promised repeatedly that he would never raise taxes on Americans making less than $250,000 per year. A review by Americans for Tax Reform of Obama's first 100 days in office shows he has broken this promise on at least two occasions.

PROMISE:

"I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes" (September 12, 2008, Dover, NH)



"No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama's plan will see one single penny of their tax raised," Joe Biden said, "whether it's their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax." (Joe Biden, Oct. 3, 2008, Vice Presidential Debate, St. Louis, MO)



DATES PROMISE BROKEN:

Feb. 4 -- just 16 days into his presidency, Obama signs into law a 156 percent increase in the federal excise tax on tobacco, a hike of 61 cents per pack, which took effect on April 1.

The tax increase falls squarely on the shoulders of the middle and low-income Americans Obama said he would not raise taxes on: 55 percent of smokers are "working poor", one in four smokers live below the poverty line, and on average, smokers, whose median income is a little more than $36,000 make about 30 percent less than non-smokers.

Feb. 26 -- Obama released his FY 2010 budget which imposes a range of tax hikes including a "cap and trade" tax of $646 billion. Every American family will pay this tax in the form of higher gasoline, heating and electric bills. By adding together the "cap and trade" tax increase along with other energy tax hikes in the Obama budget and dividing by the number of families, it's clear what this annual tax hike would be: The average American family would pay, directly or indirectly, approximately $10,000 per year in new energy taxes.