Where’s the change behind rhetoric?
February 24, 2012From: POLITICO
As the campaign season heats up, I can’t help but notice President Barack Obama is dusting off the same old sweeping rhetoric and speechwriting skills that catapulted the first-term senator to the presidency three years ago. Unfortunately, despite promising us all that “change was coming,” this president has fallen back on his tried-and-true platitudes that are shrouded in anti-business oratory.
The latest proposal is the president’s push for “insourcing American jobs,” which he intends to accomplish via tweaking our convoluted Tax Code by adding new layers of credits, deductions, exemptions and writeoffs. This should come as no surprise, he’s been beating the “shipping our jobs overseas” drum since Sen. Hillary Clinton was the front-runner in Iowa.
This seems great on the surface, but digging a bit deeper, you can see the tax changes he continues to propose actually make our position in a global economy even worse. Not only will any new tax loopholes proposed by the president decrease yearly revenues and add to our debt, but the president’s proposal will do nothing to address the fact that the U.S. currently houses the second-highest business tax rate of any OECD countries, nor the fact that the U.S. remains one of the only countries in the world to tax business earnings on a worldwide level, subjecting it to another level of taxation. Unlike almost all of our major trading partners, we tax our companies on their foreign income when that income is brought back to the United States, even though that income already has been taxed in a foreign country. This discourages our companies from bringing profits back to the U.S. to invest at home.
