A basic tenant of taxation is that income should be taxed at source. If the income of these companies is genuinely from foreign operations then the USA should have no claim on them. The loophole that really needs to be closed is the one that allows companies to claim particular income was generated in a certain low-tax jurisdiction, and be right from a tax-law point of view, when even a 9 year old would be able to conclude that the origin of the income is in another higher tax jurisdiction. Google and Starbucks have been in the news recently for pulling this trick in Europe, but all the multinationals do the same.
I mean if you were a CEO and you had to decide where to have your legal headquarters why would you decide to have it in a country that taxed income not earned in that country? And at a high rate at that. Unless you were in the defense industry ("Deep State"), or reliant on government contracts otherwise, you'd be crazy to.
The solution for governments is to go back to basics by taxing income at source, and making sure source is correctly determined. And by correctly I mean by a process of common sense, not a legalistic sense designed from the outset to obfuscate. The states predicament is their own doing because they have allowed lobbyists to carve out exceptions and special treatments that are now used by far more companies than originally paid the bribes...I mean political donations.
I mean if you were a CEO and you had to decide where to have your legal headquarters why would you decide to have it in a country that taxed income not earned in that country? And at a high rate at that. Unless you were in the defense industry ("Deep State"), or reliant on government contracts otherwise, you'd be crazy to.
The solution for governments is to go back to basics by taxing income at source, and making sure source is correctly determined. And by correctly I mean by a process of common sense, not a legalistic sense designed from the outset to obfuscate. The states predicament is their own doing because they have allowed lobbyists to carve out exceptions and special treatments that are now used by far more companies than originally paid the bribes...I mean political donations.