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Clinton’s Plan to Complicate Corporate Taxes

December 10, 2015

By Paula Dwyer

To Hillary Clinton, corporations are being unpatriotic when they combine with a smaller foreign company and then move their legal addresses overseas, where taxes are lower. This week she released a plan to stop such tax-avoidance trickery, which has been on the rise in recent years.

Let's be clear: It's no more unpatriotic for companies to try to lower their tax bills than it was for the Clintons to take a deduction for donating used skivvies to a charity, as they did in the 1980s.

That doesn't mean the corporate maneuver, known as an inversion, is good for America. It isn't. As Clinton says, mergers should be carried out for business reasons, not to take advantage of tax loopholes. Inversions also erode the tax base needed to maintain roads, rails and ports, support basic research, enforce trade treaties and perform the million other tasks that allow U.S. companies to conduct business across 50 states with little friction.

Clinton, though, has a propensity to address problems with complicated five-point plans involving a mix of legislative and executive actions, when a simple solution -- lowering U.S. corporate taxes to match what the rest of the developed world charges -- would suffice.

Read the full article at Bloomberg View: Clinton's Plan to Complicate Corporate Taxes

Issue Categories : Hillary Clinton, Taxes