Obama Launches Foolish Assault on U.S. Companies
J.D. Foster /
In his remarks to Congress Tuesday night, President Obama repeated a liberal clarion call to eliminate a tax incentive for U.S. businesses to invest and move jobs overseas. Most Americans surely have no idea what he’s talking about. And most Americans would surely oppose any tax provision that would encourage American companies to ship jobs overseas. I would, too.
But what’s he really talking about? He doesn’t say. But since we’ve heard this rhetoric dating back since before the Kennedy Administration, it seems safe to assume the President is referring again to a bugaboo called “deferral”. Before describing how this tax provision works, one simple fact suggests the reality differs fundamentally from the President’s rhetoric: Through the Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton Administrations, and through decades of Democratic control of the House and Senate, this tax provision has remained fundamentally unchanged. If it were really a tax subsidy to move jobs overseas, wouldn’t it have been repealed long ago?