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CTJ, Heritage Foundation, Tax Foundation and Others AGREE that the 60 Former Hill Staffers Lobbying for Repatriation Amnesty Are Wrong
Bloomberg reports that the corporate coalition promoting 
a tax amnesty for offshore profits that U.S. corporations repatriate to the U.S. has hired 160 lobbyists, including an astounding 60 people who formerly served as staff to current members of Congress.
This breathtaking chart illustrates how everyone from President Obama’s former communications director to the Democratic Finance Committee chairman’s former chief of staff is now being paid by corporations to promote the repatriation amnesty.
Even more remarkable is that the organizations that study tax policy and agree on nothing have come to a consensus that this proposal should be rejected. Groups like Citizens for Tax Justice and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have been joined by the anti-tax Tax Foundation and the extremely conservative Heritage Foundation in opposing the proposal.
Naturally, the consensus ends there. For example, CTJ explains that the way to really fix our international tax rules is to remove the tax break that causes U.S. corporations to shift profits and operations overseas in the first place (“deferral”) while the Tax Foundation argues instead for permanently exempting offshore corporate profits from U.S. taxes. “However,” the Tax Foundation explains, “experience shows that the [repatriation] holiday has been ineffective policy.”
The Heritage Foundation is similarly unimpressed with the proposal, saying:
“The issue here is not whether tax cuts are good or bad per se, but whether this particular tax cut would increase domestic employment and domestic jobs. Again, the answer is that it would not. . . Are these repatriating companies capital-constrained today? No, they are not. These large multinational companies have enormous sums of accumulated earnings parked in the financial markets already.”
Other organizations that have published analyses extremely critical of the proposal include the Economic Policy Institute, the Tax Policy Center, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The proposed repatriation amnesty, which proponents call a “repatriation holiday,” would temporarily remove all or almost all U.S. taxes on the profits that U.S. corporations bring back to the U.S. from other countries, including profits that they shifted to offshore tax havens using accounting gimmicks and transactions that only exist on paper.
Here’s what we have said about this debate:
“The twenty companies that repatriated the most offshore profits under the temporary repatriation amnesty enacted by Congress in 2004 now have almost triple the amount of profits ‘permanently reinvested’ (i.e., parked) overseas as they did at the end of 2005.”
Call on Congress to Oppose the Amnesty for Corporate Tax Dodgers
1. Another repatriation amnesty will cost the U.S. $79 billion in tax revenue according to the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation.
2. Another repatriation amnesty will cost the U.S. jobs because it will encourage corporations to shift even more investment offshore.
3. The proposal is an amnesty for corporate tax dodgers because those corporations that shift profits into tax havens benefit the most from it.
4. Congress enacted a repatriation amnesty in 2004, and the benefits went to dividend payments for corporate shareholders rather than job creation, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. Many of the corporations that benefited actually reduced their U.S. workforce.
Here’s more from CTJ on the right way to fix our international tax rules:
Congress Should End “Deferral” Rather than Adopt a “Territorial” Tax System