From Bloomberg:
Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.
“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”
U.S. tax rules let companies defer paying corporate rates as high as 35 percent on most types of foreign profits as long as that money remains invested overseas. Obama says he wants to end such incentives to keep foreign profits tax-deferred so that companies would invest them in the U.S.
Microsoft reported an overall effective tax rate of 26 percent for 2008 in its last annual report. “Our effective tax rates are less than the statutory tax rate due to foreign earnings taxed at lower rates,” the report said.
In a roundtable discussion, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies [Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes] would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.
“It is a little bit ironic that most of our most significant trading partners and partners globally have taken the tack that they’ll reduce corporate tax rates to stimulate economic growth and not raise corporate tax rates [Obama proposals],” Thompson said.
Maybe we should just “allow” Obama and his government to acquire/own these technology giants. Maybe the federal government should own all private businesses. Or just let these companies be driven out of the U.S. by our draconian tax policies.
No company CEO simply wakes up one morning and says, “Gee, let’s move all our money and assets to Ireland,” – they’re driven unwillingly to that solution by the federal government. And an exodus of business and the huge monies involved certainly will not help our current economic woes.
So is Obama really wanting to help the country’s economy, or control it? This is the Hope And Change you so desperately wanted back in November 2008.
Obama, tax, corporate tax, Hope And Change
