Last week I wrote a profoundly lucid blog about the trend in the medical device and pharmaceutical industries toward “inversion mergers” whereby a US corporation merges into a foreign entity, whose tax base is in a country with lower corporate taxes than we have here in the US. Which is to say every single developed nation. This is such basic economics and business theory, it really needs no explanation. Companies (and individuals to the extent they can) will always seek the location of lowest taxes. Any CEO who doesn’t should be fired and investigated for malfeasance.
Then comes a breathtakingly stupid article in yesterday’s Washington Post Business Section. I’ve written in the past what a joke the Post is, but this took it to a new level. The gist of the article was to chastise corporate executives and their boards for leaving the US to seek lower tax rates, thereby harming the economy by taking their business elsewhere.
OH-MY-GOD.
The liberal reaction to non-competitive tax rates is to blame the companies that seek lower taxes as opposed to the government that has created a non-competitive environment in which to conduct business? Really? If you ever needed concrete evidence that there’s no hope that liberals will ever solve our economic woes, this is it. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such abject cluelessness.
When a country is fettered by an uncompetitive tax structure, it can be concluded that it is the government that is unpatriotic.
When the left sees fleeing businesses, or citizens, their first reaction is towards some type of coercive restraint or punishment. And that just shows how close they are to their ideological cousins who built the Berlin Wall.