The USSR set up an Iron Curtain around its nation and its “sphere of influence” in Europe that was designed to keep its citizens from leaving for greener pastures. The Curtain became a real, physical barrier in the form of the Berlin Wall. To a large extent, it worked: even though citizens did manage to escape, the outflow was reduced markedly, and far too many citizens died on the Berlin Wall (or under it) attempting to escape.
Now the proud Progressive and Democratic Party Presidential candidate wants to erect an Iron Curtain around the United States designed to keep American businesses from leaving.
Hillary Clinton’s plan to deter companies from leaving the US will include an “exit tax,” her campaign said Monday, making it even more restrictive than President Barack Obama’s proposals.
Never mind that American business owners and managers have a fiduciary duty—embedded in our laws as well as our morality—to maximize profits for the company and its owners—partners, shareholders, Mom and Pop. Never mind that this mandate to maximize profits necessarily includes minimizing costs. Never mind that the US taxes its businesses at the highest rate in the world, and that these tax bills are significant costs.
Never mind that minimizing the tax bill is a necessary part of that fiduciary duty, and it must, then, include consideration of foreign tax environments—and tax inversions, the process of buying, or being bought by, companies in jurisdictions that have lower tax rates and then moving the company into that lower tax jurisdiction.
Mrs Clinton would…require[e] companies to pay US taxes on deferred foreign earnings if they attempt to “game” her new threshold….
The current “threshold” is current law that allows inversions so long as the American company’s shareholders will own less than 80% of the new, merged company. Clinton’s lower threshold is, carefully, not yet specified.
This is the sort of barrier to our economic freedom, the sort of increase in Big Government taxation, the sort of destruction of our individual liberties to which we can look forward if we get this Progressive Democrat for President.
This is only a precursor to additional barriers to free movement we can expect from this Progressive Democrat.
