Clinton has long used Trump’s presidential bid as a laugh line in her otherwise wonky stump speech, with his name regularly eliciting boos and hisses from attendees. That would enable Pfizer to slash its tax rate from around 25 percent this year to about 18 percent. If people are still asking these questions after her many decades in the public eye, it seems to show that she has not convinced a massive number of voters that she is a worthy candidate for their support.
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Hillary Clinton unveiled a plan Wednesday to crack down on a controversial practice that allows USA companies to relocate overseas to avoid paying billions of dollars in federal taxes.
Corporate inversions appear most popular in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, where companies purchased smaller players in places such as Ireland or the Netherlands, countries known for lower corporate taxes.
Clinton has called on the U.S. Congress to stop such deals by requiring the acquiring foreign entities to control at least a 50 percent stake in the combined company instead of the 20 percent under current law.
The deal would “leave US taxpayers holding the bag”, Clinton said in a statement at the time. Ireland’s lower corporate tax rate would have saved Pfizer almost $1 billion of the $3.1 billion in US taxes it paid in 2014.
Donald Trump on the field prior to a game between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays on September 23, 2010 at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City. Experts say United States companies are hoarding roughly $2 trillion in profits overseas to reduce their taxes. That’s because they have legions of lawyers reading the tax code for deductions, credits and exclusions – and scouring the globe for havens in which to tuck money away.
Republicans in Congress say an U.S. Interior Department investigation glossed over the federal government’s negligence in a massive toxic wastewater spill that fouled rivers in three states.
Clinton surely recognizes this is the best fix. So far, the rules haven’t addressed earnings stripping, which many lawyers say is critical to limiting the tax benefits of inversions, but administration officials indicated as recently as Tuesday that they are still considering taking action on the issue.
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Clinton reminded the 400 attendees at a “Fighting for Us” town hall at the Five Sullivan Brothers Convention Center of the deep recession the country faced when Democratic President Barack Obama took office. No doubt, Clinton’s exit tax will get the same treatment.
