Trickle Down and Out

THE ELECTION OF Donald Trump will be a moment of reckoning for America’s tech firms, which hold an unprecedented amount of power in the face of a president who holds an unprecedented disregard for basically everything. We’ll see, gradually, if Silicon Valley bows to Trump, remains neutral, or tries to counter his genuinely destructive agenda.

[...]

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, despite direct threats from Trump to destroy his company, went out of his way to publicly make nice with the president-elect just two days after the election.

  The Intercept

I bet he did. Why is Trump have against Amazon? I'm too lazy to look it up.

The current statutory tax rate for U.S.-based multinational corporations is 35 percent on profits earned anywhere in the world. However, tax law allows companies to defer paying taxes on profits they earn overseas until they bring the money back to the U.S. This has given corporations a huge incentive to do two things: 1) Use accounting chicanery to make as much of their profits as possible seem to have been “earned” in other countries, and 2) Leave those profits overseas until they can arrange a special sweetheart tax deal for themselves.

Because of this, American companies now hold a staggering $2.4 trillion in other countries. That’s more than all the profits every U.S. company makes in a year combined, or, looked at another way, about 14 percent of the size of the entire U.S. economy.

And you wonder why Social Security is broke.

Donald Trump’s official economic plan calls for the $2.4 trillion to be taxed at a special, one-time rate of 10 percent. Then the statutory rate going forward would be lowered from 35 percent to 15 percent.

You think Reaganomics will work this time?

After [a] corporate bonanza [in 2004 in the form of a tax holiday], U.S.-based multinationals actually cut jobs and decreased spending on research and development [after having lobbied using the exact opposite claim]. According to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush “got so mad that he signed the five and three-quarter percent repatriation bill and, he said, none of it was reinvested.”

Instead corporations used the money for stock buybacks and to pay executives more. Compensation for the top five officials at the largest affected companies went up about 60 percent in the two years after the tax holiday.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.