While Ireland’s corporate tax rate is low, at 12.5 percent, Apple’s less-than-single-digit rates have more to do with other components of tax regimes that allow corporations to move profits frictionlessly throughout Europe and beyond, often ending up in island havens with zero tax rates. Shifting massive profits through a network of subsidiaries isn’t unique to Apple; many US multinational companies have haven operations. As of 2017, American companies stored over $2.5 trillion of earnings overseas.
Figure 7.10: After-Tax Corporate Profits Are At Fifty-Year Highs
Data source: Federal Reserve.
Indeed, US multinational companies are global leaders in tax avoidance, causing concerns abroad about their aggressive tax planning and reduced tax payments. For example, European Union officials have recently argued that US multinational corporations have received excessive amounts of tax relief from EU member states.
In the end, corporate after-tax profits are doing very well. While our economy isn’t perfect, our corporations are generating greater after-tax profits than ever before (fig. 7.10).
Item 2: Protect the Corporate Tax Base from International Profit Shifting
The corporate tax is our only systematic tool for taxing capital income. It cannot be easily replaced with individual level taxation.39 The corporate tax is also a highly progressive feature of our tax system, since it falls more heavily on relatively concentrated sources of income, such as capital income and rents. While the corporate tax may harm workers somewhat, it burdens workers far less than most alternative taxes, such as the payroll tax, labor income taxes, or consumption taxes.40
What Not to Do: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
In late December 2017, Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). This legislation is discussed in more detail in Chapter 10; here I focus on the corporate tax provisions that pertain to multinational companies. The legislation did not seek a revenue-neutral business tax reform as had previously been proposed by plans from both the Obama Administration and Dave Camp, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means from 2011 to 2015. Instead, the TCJA provides about $650 billion in corporate tax cuts over ten years; there is a small revenue loss due to the international business tax provisions.1
The main international business provisions are summarized below, comparing the law before and after the TCJA with a revenue-neutral reform proposal.
This simple table omits many complexities, but the law lowers the corporate rate dramatically, and the international provisions of the law encourage profit shifting by adopting a territorial tax system, no longer applying US tax to foreign income. While there are also provisions to discourage profit shifting, captured by the colorful acronyms BEAT and GILTI, the Joint Committee on Tax estimates that the international provisions will actually lose revenue relative to current law.2 This is difficult to do, given the vast scale of the current profit shifting problem.
Table 7.1 Before and After the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Before TCJA
After TCJA1
Revenue-Neutral Reform Proposal2
Statutory corporate rate
35
21
25–28
Rate on foreign income earned in haven without tax
0 until repatriation, then 35
0 until you reach a threshold of excess profits, then 10.5
Ideally, closer to the US rate (19 in Obama plan)
Rate on foreign non-haven income
Foreign rate until repatriation, then US taxes, allowing foreign tax credit
Below US rate if blended with haven income3
Foreign rate, unless foreign rate is too low, then minimum tax rate
Notes:
1. Under the TCJA, the corporate rate may be somewhat lower if the firm has above-normal profits generated by export sales. However, that provision (the FDII) is likely to be challenged by trading partners since it is not compatible with WTO obligations.
2. This column reports the author’s estimate of what a true revenue-neutral tax reform would entail, based on an overview of the Camp and Obama proposals as well as recent developments. For more detail on what a revenue-neutral business tax reform might look like, see Kimberly Clausing, Edward Kleinbard, and Thornton Matheson, “US Corporate Income Tax Reform and Its Spillovers,” IMF Working Paper WP/16/127, July 2016.
3. Since the TCJA uses a global minimum tax, tax obligations in higher-tax countries can offset the minimum tax due on haven income. Therefore, companies can blend their haven and non-haven foreign income, reducing the bite of the US minimum tax. (80 percent of the foreign taxes paid are creditable.)
While there is a minimum tax that applies to tax haven income in the TCJA, haven income is still taxed at half the US rate, and taxed only above a 10 percent return on tangible assets. This generates a perverse incentive to shift tangible investments offshore to soften the bite of the minimum tax. In addition, since the minimum tax applies on a global basis, income earned in all foreign countries is tax-preferred relative to income earned in the United States, since high-tax foreign income acts to cushion companies from minimum tax due on low-tax foreign income.
In the end, once the dust clears, the legislation provides large corporate tax cuts, large revenue losses, and a far less progressive tax system. It also fails to make progress addressing our profit shifting problem. Most disheartening, the large deficits created by the bill will make future business tax reforms far more difficult.
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1. This ignores the revenue associated with the one-time tax cut on prior unrepatriated earnings.
2. These estimates are the December 15 conference agreement estimates provided on the Joint Committee on Tax website. Again, this ignores the revenue raised by the temporary repatriation provision. Under prior law, those earnings were taxable upon repatriation at the US rate, but the TCJA deemed these prior earnings repatriated, and taxed them at a special lower rate of 8 or 15.5 percent, payable over eight years.
The question, then, is how to design a better corporate tax that is more suited to a global economy. To stem profit shifting to tax havens, we should stop the tax system’s favoring of foreign income. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), we allowed the deferral of US taxation on foreign income until it was repatriated to the United States. Post TCJA, we tax haven income at half the US rate, and completely exempt from tax the first ten percent of the return on assets. Rather than either of these approaches, we should tax foreign income as it is earned at the normal rate (allowing a tax credit for foreign tax). Doing so would remove the tax incentive to shift profits to tax havens as well as the tax disincentive to repatriate income.41
An alternative, more incremental, step would be to institute a per-country minimum tax that would tax foreign income as it was earned, not allowing deferral of US tax on income earned in the lowest-tax countries. A per-country minimum tax is more effective than the global minimum approach of the TCJA, since it avoids incentivizing all foreign income relative to US income.42 This incremental step would in fact be a big move in the right direction, since about 98 percent of profit shifting is toward countries with tax rates below 15 percent.43 Other helpful steps would include stronger rules to limit “earnings-stripping” (aimed at preventing artificial financial arrangements that shift profit out of the US tax base) and other measures designed to discourage corporate inversions, such as an exit tax.44
A more fundamental reform would be to require worldwide corporate tax consolidation. This would require a multinational firm to report all income and all expenses in a single, consolidated return, allowing foreign tax credits for foreign taxes paid. Losses could also be used to offset income throughout the global enterprise. This sort of reform would better align our tax system with the reality of globally integrated corporations.45
A more novel approach would be to tax all global corporations the same way we tax national corporations in US states, by a system called
formulary apportionment. Instead of asking Intel to separately account for its income and expenses in Oregon, Oregon (like all other states that tax corporate income) assigns some fraction of Intel’s national income to the state, based on the fraction of Intel’s national economic activities that are in Oregon. (Different states use different formulas to make this assignment.) Historically, this system has offered a way around the vast complexity of separately accounting for income in each individual state when a business’s operations are well integrated across states.
The same logic would apply to globally-integrated businesses that have difficulty accounting for income in individual nations when their operations are truly global. This difficulty establishing the source of income also generates ample tax avoidance opportunities, as companies seek to book income in the most tax-advantageous locations. To apply formulary apportionment, the United States would tax firms like Intel, Nike, Apple, Bayer, or Honda based on their global income. The fraction of their global income taxable in the United States would be based on the fraction of the company’s real economic activity conducted in the United States—as reflected by payroll, jobs, or sales—versus elsewhere in the world. Real factors such as employment and sales are far simpler to measure than income, given the accounting fictions involved in reporting income under the current system. Currently, we require accountants to specify the location of income, despite the fact that income often has no easily-established source due to the efficiencies associated with multinational business activity as well as the intangible nature of much modern economic value.46 This ambiguity amounts to an open invitation to assign profits to tax havens. A system of formulary apportionment would be much more difficult to game, since determining the location of customers or employees is relatively clear-cut.47 This system has worked well in subnational contexts in the United States, Canada and elsewhere.48
In comparison to our pre-TCJA tax system, any of these reforms could be accompanied by a lower statutory rate and still yield greater revenue, since our corporate tax base has been so leaky due to profit shifting to tax havens. Post-TCJA, tax rate increases may be needed, since it is unclear we can afford the large net business tax cuts of the TCJA. In the interests of revenue, efficiency, progressivity, and tax administration, it is vital to have a predictable and healthy US corporate tax.49 With that goal in mind, discouraging international profit shifting must be a priority.
Item 3: Pay Attention to the Fundamentals
In discussions about the competitiveness of US multinational firms, corporate interests often emphasize tax burdens as a determinative influence. Yet, as noted above, even the pre-TCJA statutory rate of 35 percent had more bark than bite; American multinational firms are often able to achieve very low effective tax rates. More important to US corporate success in a global economy are healthy economic fundamentals. While we often take such things for granted, they are essential to the success of US businesses and the workers within them. An incomplete list of such fundamental factors follows.
Sound macroeconomic policy. Managing economic fluctuations and keeping US debt and deficits at sustainable levels requires sound macroeconomic policy—guiding the actions of both the central bank (monetary policy) and the US government (fiscal policy). Macroeconomic policy-makers make changes in the money supply and the budget balance in light of economic conditions to dampen recessions and avoid costly periods of unemployment or inflation. (Unfortunately, the TCJA moves in the opposite direction, since it expands the budget deficit at a time when the economy is already quite strong. Since these tax cuts increase our national debt, they will make it more difficult to respond to the next recession.)
Sound financial regulation. The financial system is the bloodstream of the economy. Financial markets (stock markets, bond markets, and the banking system) provide essential funds for companies. These markets are essential to the functioning of our economy. They help companies fund new investments or meet payroll, and they help individuals borrow for home purchases and college educations. When the financial system flounders, this can have large spillover effects on the real economy, as we saw when the 2008 financial crisis gave way to the Great Recession. Adequate financial regulation is essential. This means ensuring sufficient capitalization of financial institutions; not allowing institutions to reach a point of being “too big to fail”; containing the larger financial system (such as “shadow banks”) within the regulatory system; and making sure that risks to the larger economy are well understood and managed.
Robust infrastructure. A healthy and well-functioning infrastructure is fundamental to economic success; it facilitates the smooth flow of goods, services, and ideas. Public investments in roads and bridges, ports and airports, and computing and internet access are likely to pay large dividends, especially given our decades of underinvestment in these areas.
Investments in basic science and research. America’s lead in science and technology resulted from important investments in basic science and research. Government funding for basic research through the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and institutions of higher education is essential to this success.
A prepared workforce. Preparing workers for the jobs of tomorrow is essential. The education system needs to be well-funded and well-designed to equip people to make the best of a working world that is experiencing rapid technological change. Buttressing workers’ bargaining power through adequate labor laws and protections is also important.
A policy agenda that addresses these fundamentals will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 9.
This chapter began with the observation that the world’s largest multinational corporations come with many benefits: they make good products; they innovate, adopting and spreading cutting-edge technologies; and they make investments in both production and in their own workers. They have astounding global reach, conduct the vast majority of all international trade, and achieve staggering efficiencies. Yet they also present policy challenges relating to four concerns: they are becoming larger and more powerful; their power creates downsides for workers; their global scope creates regulatory challenges for national governments; and their mobility can cause excessive corporate tax cuts that serve no nation well. While these concerns are challenging, there are ways to modernize economic policy to adapt to the technological sophistication and international mobility of today’s global companies. The United States can address the downsides of today’s multinational corporations, without endangering our dynamic business environment.
Eight
Immigrants, We Get the Job Done!
In the recent Broadway musical Hamilton, the immigrant origins of our nation are celebrated.1 We learn the story of Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers and the nation’s first treasury secretary. Hamilton was an orphaned immigrant from the West Indies who, as the song goes, “got a lot farther by working a lot harder, by being a lot smarter, by being a self-starter.” This narrative of a striving, foreign-born hero fits with a long American tradition of celebrating the scrappy beginnings of many of our national heroes. The idea of the American dream is that, if you work hard, your merit and drive will take you to the top of American society; your country of origin, your parents, and your inheritance (or lack thereof) are not determinative.2
We are a country with a long immigrant past. The 98 percent of US citizens that are not Native American can be traced to immigrants, distinguished only by how long it has been since they or their forebears arrived. Yet, while the United States is a nation of immigrants, it is also a nation conflicted about immigration. Waves of backlash have occurred throughout our history. Our immigration policies have moved in fits and starts, with periods of liberal immigration followed by periods of more restricted immigration. As successive cohorts of immigrants arrive, those preceding them too often view the new ones as somehow less desirable than those that came before.
Figure 8.1: Immigrant Source Countries to the United States in 2015
N
ote: The map shows where immigrants residing in the United States in 2015 were born. Data source: US Census.
As this chapter will describe, it is almost impossible to imagine the American economy without immigrants. They have been a foundational part of our economic success in history, and their positive contribution continues today. In contrast, the negative effects of immigrants are typically overstated, especially relative to the large gains for the economy as a whole. This chapter shows that the benefits from increasing immigration are likely to be substantial. Given the present pressures on the US economy, a less restrictive immigration policy would make good sense.
A Nation of Immigrants
While immigration has increased in recent decades, as a share of the population, it is still shy of historic peaks around the turn of the twentieth century. While the absolute number of immigrants is larger than in times past, the share of immigrants in the population is a better indicator of their importance. As Figure 8.2 shows, immigrants are now about 13 percent of the population. These data, and the remainder of this chapter, define immigrants as any US residents who were born abroad.3
While immigrants are less than one-seventh of the population, they have an outsized effect on many key areas of the US economy. For example, they are disproportionately entrepreneurial; both in the United States and elsewhere, immigrants are more likely to found businesses than native populations.4 A 2012 report shows that more than 40 percent of America’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children—including the oldest on the list, Bank of New York Mellon, founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton.5 Other important American companies with immigrant founders include Google (now part of Alphabet), AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Kohl’s, Nordstrom, Qualcomm, and DuPont.
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