Biden’s Tax Plan Contains a Poison Pill for American Firms that Compete in Global Markets

May 24, 2021 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty 

As explained here, here, here, and here, I don’t like Biden’s class-warfare tax policy.

 

I’m especially concerned about his approach to business taxation.

1. He wants to penalize American-based companies with the highest corporate tax rate among all developed nations.
2. He wants to export that bad policy to the rest of the world with a “global minimum tax” – sort of an OPEC for politicians.
3. He wants to handicap American multinational companies with taxes that don’t apply to foreign-based firms.

Regarding the third point, I wrote a column on that topic for the Orange County Register.

Here’s how I described Biden’s proposal.

Biden has proposed several tax increases that specifically target American firms that compete in world markets. Most notably, the Administration has proposed to double the tax rate on “global intangible low-tax income” (GILTI) from 10.5 percent to 21 percent. Translated from tax jargon to English, this is largely a tax on the income American firms earn overseas from intellectual property, most notably patents and royalties. Keep in mind, by the way, that this income already is subject to tax in the nations where it is earned. Most other nations do not handicap their companies with similar policies, so this means that American firms will face a big competitive disadvantage – especially when fighting for business in low-tax jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland, and most of Eastern Europe.

And here are some additional reasons why it is very bad news.

…let’s simply look at the bottom-line impact of what Biden is proposing. The Tax Foundation estimates that, “The proposal would impose a 9.4 percent average surtax on the foreign activities of U.S. multinationals above and beyond the taxes levied by foreign governments” and “put U.S. multinationals at a competitive disadvantage relative to foreign corporations.” …a stagging $1.2 trillion tax increase on these companies. …This is not just bad for the competitiveness of American-based companies, it is also bad policy. Good fiscal systems, such as the flat tax, are based on “territorial taxation,” which is the common-sense notion that countries only tax economic activity inside their borders. …Many other nations follow this approach, which is why they will reap big benefits if Biden’s plan to hamstring American companies is approved. The key thing to understand is that the folks in Washington have the power to raise taxes on American companies competing abroad, but they don’t have the ability to raise taxes on the foreign companies in those overseas markets.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page has been sounding the alarm on this issue as well.

Here are some excerpts from an editorial back in April.

…the tax on global intangible low-tax income, known as Gilti, which was created by the 2017 tax reform. …Gilti was flawed from the start…but Mr. Biden would make it worse in every respect. …The 2017 tax law set the statutory Gilti rate at…10.5%. Mr. Biden would increase that to 21%… the effective rate companies actually pay is higher. This is because Gilti embedded double taxation in the tax code. …Gilti allows a credit of only 80% of foreign taxes, with no carry-forwards or carry-backs. …Raising the statutory rate to 21% increases that effective rate to 26.25%. This new Biden effective minimum tax would be higher than the statutory tax rates in most countries even in Western Europe… The Biden plan would further increase the effective Gilti rate by expanding the tax base on which it’s paid. …A third Biden whammy would require companies to calculate tax bills on a country-by-country basis. …Requiring companies to calculate taxable profits and tax credits individually for every country in which a company operates will create a mountain of compliance costs for business and work for the Internal Revenue Service. …The Biden Administration and its progressive political masters have decided they don’t care about the global competitiveness of American companies.

Let’s close with some international comparisons.

According to the most-recent International Tax Competitiveness Index, the United States ranks #21 out of 35 nations, which is a mediocre score.

But the United States had been scoring near the bottom, year after year, before the Trump tax reform bumped America up to #21. So there was some progress.

If the Biden plan is approved, however, it is a near-certainly that the U.S. will be once again mired at the bottom. And this bad policy will lead to unfortunate results for American workers and American competitiveness.

Draft Father of Anti-America

 April 9, 2021 By Ned Cosby

If George Washington is the Father of our country, then Ted Kennedy is the father of anti-America......... a deep-seated disdain for the America most of us love........... hates our history, our culture, and our success. Hatred, victimhood, and bitterness are the elements binding anti-America together.............The first scandal came when he was a Harvard freshman. When he was failing a Spanish class, he recruited a friend to take a Spanish exam for him. He and the stand-in were caught and expelled from Harvard.

Like many politicians, Ted Kennedy had a reputation for womanizing.......... presumably drunk, drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts. Mary Jo Kopechne, who was in the car with him, drowned .............. Before Chappaquiddick, Ted was a leading Democrat contender for the party’s Presidential nomination in 1972. Even though Kennedy kept his Senate seat after Chappaquiddick, the Democrats looked elsewhere for a candidate in 1972, ending his first chance to become President...........Kennedy fundamentally disliked America. 

He was anti-American. ...........Kennedy’s involvement in “immigration reform” shows him to be the Father of anti-America............While Ronald Reagan was President, Kennedy reached out to Yuri Andropov, president of our Cold War enemy, Russia, for help discrediting President Reagan..................If you look at the modern Democratic Party and see hatred, bitterness, and victimhood, credit the Father of it all: Ted Kennedy...............To Read More.... 

My Take - While I agree Ted Kennedy was just as anti-American as he says, he's giving this loser far too much credit by calling him the Father of Anti-Americanism.   Anti-Americanism has existed since before the beginning of the 20th century and grew in the darkness without Kennedy, reflecting all the hatred, envy, anger, greed and violent behavior that is imbued in the left.  All that Kennedy and his crowd represented then and now.  The difference?  They're no longer hiding in the dark.   

The Biden White House: A Diversity of Racists and Anti-Semites

They may look like America – but they don’t think like Americans. 

Wed Apr 14, 2021 David Horowitz and John Perazzo 50 comments  This article originally appeared in PJMmedia.com.

Formally introducing his cabinet to the public, Joe Biden proudly declared: “This is the first [time] in American history that the Cabinet looks like America.” Looking at the actual appointments and not just the gender, skin color and ethnic origins of the Biden team, it is a team that may look like America but doesn’t think like America. In fact, it is a team whose outlook is anti-American.

Take Biden’s Vice Presidential choice, Kamala Harris, whose antipathy for America oozes from her every pore. At a February 2019 presidential campaign stop, for example she said Columbus Day should be replaced with “Indigenous People’s Day” because “we are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country.”  This is an accurate summary of the way the Biden White House views its native land, and it is a view encapsulating three big lies.

What America did with the slave system it inherited from the British was end it. America’s abolition campaign began with its revolutionary proclamation that all men are created equal and have a God given right to liberty. America began implementing this right in 1787, the first year of its existence, with the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, outlawing slavery in a territory the size of the original 13 colonies.  Within twenty years slavery was abolished in all the northern states. As for the “original sin” of enslaving the black Africans brought to this country that properly is the achievement of the Africans themselves who then sold their brothers and sisters to Europeans at slave auctions in Ghana and Benin..........To Read More....

There’s Just No Way Around It, ‘Because Without America There Is No Free World’

By Judi McLeod —— Bio and Archives--August 20, 2020

It was Gang-Up Time at the Democrat Convention last night. Gang-Up Time for hate-filled, vengeful big 2016 losers Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who waited four years to get even, not just with the successfully elusive president—but the 63 million and still growing people who voted him in.
All but the most gullible among us knew last night was coming, just as most know that Desperado Dems will come up with anything they can to rig the 2020 Election—sometime between today and November 3.

For the Democrats, the timing couldn’t have possibly been more perfect: a captive audience on home, church and business lockdown, forced to wear face masks on the threat of fines and in some places—even arrest—even with a pandemic in visible decline..........To Read More....

Democrats Put Iran Ahead of America

Posted by Daniel Greenfield Thursday, April 23, 2020 0 Comments @ Sultan Knish Blog

On April 9th, as California passed 500 Wuhan Virus deaths and 19,000 cases, Senator Dianne Feinstein dispatched a letter on Senate stationary to the President of the United States.

The letter did not ask for help for California, but for Iran.

Senator Feinstein wrote to express her unhappiness that President Trump had blocked Iran from getting $5 billion from the International Monetary Fund. She urged him to help the Islamic terror state, which has murdered countless Americans, get the money in the "interests of international security".

While Americans were dying, the Senate Terror Caucus was hard at work… for Iran.

In late March, Connecticut's two Democrat Senate members, Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal, along with Hawaii's Schatz, Maryland's Van Hollen, New Mexico's Udall, Maryland's Cardin, Virginia's Kaine, Vermont's Leahy, Oregon's Merkley, Delaware's Carper, and Ohio’s Brown, had dispatched a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging lowering economic sanctions on Iran and Venezuela while claiming that easing up on two terror states was “the right thing to do from a national security perspective.”

Two days earlier, Leahy, Udall, Carper, Brown, Merkeley, and Van Hollen had sent another letter to the Secretary of State on behalf of Hamas, claiming that “as of March 24, the first two cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the Gaza Strip" and insisted that it is, “in the national security interest of the United States” to help the Hamas territory.

Joining the Tehran Six were Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders.

The only reason Bernie Sanders hadn’t signed the Tehran Six letter was that he thought that it didn’t go far enough. Instead he joined Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and other terrorist supporters in calling for a suspension of sanctions on Iran.

In an embarrassing moment, the draft text of the letter was posted on the website of NIAC: described by many as the Iran Lobby in the United States. Earlier this year, Senator Tom Cotton, Senator Ted Cruz, and Senator Mike Braun had sent their own letter asking Attorney General Barr to investigate NIAC for acting as an agent of the Islamic Republic.

While Republicans wanted to hold NIAC accountable, Democrats were collaborating with it.

After Iran’s attack on our military bases, Sanders and Warren had participated in a conference call with NIAC. House Dem participants had included Rep. Ro Khanna and Rep. Barbara Lee.

The Cotton letter noted that, “NIAC's Swedish-Iranian founder, Trita Parsi, had arranged meetings between Javad Zarif, Iran's former ambassador to the United Nations and current foreign minister, and members of Congress.”

The Democrats who met with Zarif included members of the Tehran Six, Senator Murphy, who had initiated the Iran letter, and Merkeley, and Van Hollen. Murphy has spoken at NIAC events and the Iran Lobby group had described the Democrat as a “fearless ally” of its cause.

Lobbying for an Islamic terror state during a pandemic is “fearless” all right.

While the calls for suspending sanctions were couched in claims that Iran needed to be able to fight the Wuhan Virus, the proposals by Tehran Democrats went far beyond the virus.

The Sanders-Cortez-Omar letter demanded a suspension of sanctions that would “encompass major sectors of the Iranian economy, including those impacting civilian industries, Iran’s banking sector and exports of oil.”

Why does Iran need to export oil to fight the coronavirus?

Signatories to the letter calling for Iranian access to the banking sector, which it has used to fund terrorism, and to export oil, likewise, included longstanding members of the Democrat Senate and House Terror Caucus including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Ed Markey, Rep. Joaquin Castro, Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. Marc Pocan, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Gerry Connolly, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Rep. Debbie Dingell, Rep. Ro Khanna, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, and, Rep. Hank Johnson: who had compared Jews to termites.

In total, 34 House and Senate Democrats, had signed an Iran Lobby letter during one of the worst crises in American history, where many of their own constituents were dead or dying.

Official endorsees on Bernie’s Senate site included NIAC.

While the Sanders letter had started out as an extreme position, a few days later, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democrat nominee, urged President Trump to ease sanctions on Iran and “streamline channels for banking”. The beneficiaries of such measures wouldn’t be ordinary Iranians, but the regime’s terror elite and their international financial partners.

Within the space of a week, a fringe position advocated by Sanders, Cortez, and Omar had become incorporated into the official stance of the Democrat nominee for the White House.

The rapid pace at which suspending sanctions and sending billions to an Islamic terror state had become a mainstream position conveyed the incredible influence of the Iran Lobby on D.C. There are only two or so Senate and House Republicans who lobby for Iran, but a multitude of Democrats who don’t even bother asking, “how high” when the Iran Lobby tells them to jump.

To measure the scope of that influence, 6 out of 10 Democrat members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had signed their names to some version of the Iran Lobby letters.

A majority.

In the middle of a nationwide pandemic, the Iran Lobby was able to swiftly corral House and Senate Democrats into dispatching multiple letters as part of their pressure campaign.

There are two Americas. There’s the country we know and the bubble in Washington D.C.

During a pandemic, top Democrats were ignoring their dying constituents while laboring frantically to meet the demands of the Iran Lobby.

Whom do these Democrats serve?

While their letters insisted that American national interests were served by suspending sanctions on an Islamic terror state, giving it access to the banking system, and letting it export oil, none of this was in our interest, but in the interests of some of our worst enemies.

The Terror Caucus consists of many of the same members who put the interests of terrorists ahead of Americans. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib are only some of the more visible figures among bland Terror Caucus members who often represent Islamic constituencies. And since South Carolina, Omar’s ally, Rep. Jim Clyburn, the Farrakhan fan who handed the state to Joe Biden, is increasingly setting the tone for the Biden campaign.

The Terror Caucus is not a minority among the Democrats. It is driving the clown car off the cliff.

After the attacks of September 11, Joe Biden proposed, “this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran.”

His future boss would go on to illegally send billions in foreign currency on unmarked planes.

But Biden’s remark didn’t come out of nowhere. In 2002, shortly after his $200 million check proposal, he addressed the American Iranian Council. The AIC had been founded by Housang Amirahmadi, who ran for the presidency of Iran. Three times. Later that year, Biden was raising big money from Iran supporters and urging that Iran be allowed to join the WTO.

Biden is not a pawn of the Terror Caucus. He’s a founding member.

Joe Biden had celebrated the Islamic takeover of Iran. During the Iran Hostage Crisis, he had opposed the rescue of American hostages. In the nineties, he had called for an end to US broadcasts into Iran.

"Biden's political games have made him Tehran's favorite senator," an opinion piece in the Washington Post noted. Now he can be Tehran’s favorite president.

After his old boss.

Nothing conveys the deep corruption of the Terror Cause better than the frenzied Democrat lobbying for Iran in the midst of a national crisis. Even while Biden and Bernie were still battling for the nomination, they took time from their schedules to lobby for sanctions relief for Iran.

The Democrat Terror Caucus isn’t just selling out this country it’s putting terrorists ahead of Americans. At a time when President Trump and Republicans have put everything into fighting the Wuhan Virus, the Democrats are fighting just as hard to get more money to Iran.

If this is what the Terror Caucus does during a pandemic, imagine what it will do afterward.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.