I believe that the time has come to force American corporations to reinvest in their own country. In his Reuters article, David Cay Johnston provides us with the means to achieve this goal:
"Since the income tax system began, Congress has authorized a tax on excessive accumulated earnings to limit damage to the Treasury -- and the economy -- when companies hold far more cash than their operations require. Without the accumulated earnings tax, corporations can become bloated tax shelters instead of engines of growth.
A business holding more cash than its operations reasonably require can be hit with a 15 percent levy under Section 531 of the Internal Revenue Code, on top of the 35 percent corporate income tax. The Tax Court even devised a mechanical test in 1965 for how much is too much.
Historically the IRS has levied only privately owned firms or publicly traded companies with few shareholders. But Internal Revenue Code Section 531 applies to all corporations. President Ronald Reagan signed Section 532 (c), which made that explicit, though with an exception for untaxed offshore profits.
After reviewing decades of literature on these code sections, I cannot fathom any rational basis for giving multinational companies an exception to the cash hoarding rules, which discriminates against purely domestic firms.
Some of the multinational corporations say they will bring home what could be more than a trillion dollars if Congress will give them an 85 percent tax discount. The companies frame this as creating jobs. But as I showed in an earlier column, unless there are strict rules, the money can be used to buy back company stock while destroying jobs."
I would give the corporations a choice: one year to invest in physical plants, research and development, and jobs; here in America for Americans, or be hit with the accumulated earnings tax. This includes their overseas profits, which we will give them a break on, but not the 85% that they desire.
I have written on many occasions against the selfishness of the "Me Generation," and its idolatrous love of the self. There are far too many Americans who echo former British Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher's words in 1987, " There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families." ( Woman's Own magazine, London, October 31, 1987.) Unlike many Americans who hold a similar viewpoint, Prime Minister Thatcher was too smart to not understand the implications of her statement. If there is no society, if there is only the individual and the family, then the only responsibility and duty that we owe to each other are those that we have specifically contracted to with one another. There can no longer be a duty or responsibility to our country, or to our fellow man outside of our family; you cannot have a duty or responsibility to something you do not believe exists. By logical extension, if Prime Minister Thatcher is correct in her statement, if there is no society, there can be no nation-state, and if there is no nation-state, there can be no crime of treason or sedition. As an authoritarian conservative (John W. Dean's term for Mrs. Thatcher's brand of conservatism from his book Conservatives Without Conscience ), I am certain that when she was British Prime Minister, she believed in being able to prosecute traitors for those crimes.
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