Reich: What to Do About Disloyal Corporations

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/12/06/what-to-do-about-disloyal-corporations/

Just like that, Pfizer has decided it’s no longer American. It plans to link up with Ireland’s Allergan and move its corporate headquarters from New York to Ireland.

That way it will pay less tax. Ireland’s tax rate is less than half that of United States. Ian Read, Pfizer’s chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal the higher tax rate in the United States caused Pfizer to compete “with one hand tied behind our back.”

Read said he’d tried to lobby Congress to reduce the corporate tax rate (now 35 percent) but failed, so Pfizer is leaving.

Such corporate desertions from the United States (technically called “tax inversions”) will cost the rest of us taxpayers some $19.5 billion over the next decade, estimates Congress’s joint committee on taxation.

Which is fueling demands from Republicans to lower the corporate tax rate. Donald Trump wants it to be 15 percent.

Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz want to eliminate the corporate tax altogether. (Why this would save the Treasury more money than further corporate tax inversions is unclear.)

Rather than lower corporate tax rates, an easier fix would be to take away the benefits of corporate citizenship from any company that deserts America.

One big benefit is the U.S. patent system that grants companies like Pfizer longer patent protection and easier ways to extend it than most other advanced economies.

[Spider Jerusalem]

1. Reich manages to be shockingly ignorant

One big benefit is the U.S. patent system that grants companies like Pfizer longer patent protection and easier ways to extend it than most other advanced economies.

Nope! The term of patent in the US, and in Europe, is 20 years from the date of filing. Internationally standardised as part of trade negotiations under GATT/WTO in 1994. Drug companies can obtain extensions to US patent to offset the delay of FDA approval, but that's it, really.

And Pfizer is a multinational corporation that does most of its business and makes most of its profit outside the US: http://csimarket.com/stocks/segments_geo.php?code=PFE