Zuckerman: Cut Corporate Tax Rate, Limit Inversions

by JASmius



Behold, for your amusement and amazement, ladies and gentlemen, yet another reason why political moderation sucks:

Much hue and cry has arisen over the explosion of tax inversions.

Those are deals in which U.S. companies buy foreign ones and then move official headquarters overseas to avoid U.S. corporate taxes, which, at a maximum federal rate of 35%, are among the highest in the developed world.

To Mortimer Zuckerman, executive chairman of Boston Properties and editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, a solution isn't difficult."

How about marrying a lower corporate rate — 30%, say — with restricting inversions to cases where it is a genuine business move?" he writes in the Financial Times.

Hey, Mort, how about getting rid of the corporate income tax altogether, and thus the perverse economic incentive that helped breed tax "inversions" in the first place?  What is it about moderates that they insist that a little, token bit of good and a whole lot more bad is somehow (1) a "solution" and (2) even-handed?  How is the Zuckerman "compromise" "reasonable," since by definition it will not work, but will simply create an even bigger corporate tax avoidance incentive?  How is treating Corporate America a smidgeon less like The Enemy any kind of improvement?

Given how vastly more tax policy ground the Regime occupies, shouldn't they be the ones doing pretty much all the compromising, if this link-up is truly to take place anywhere remotely close to the "middle"?

Rhetorical questions, all, I realize.  But gosh darn it, they need regular, at least periodic reiteration, if only for Mort's sake.