Open thread for night owls: Romney-Ryan eager to 'fix' tax system to create more jobs (off-shore)

Roger Bybee at The Progressive writes How Romney Would Ship Jobs Overseas:

There has been precious little discussion in the media on one of the most dangerous and devastating features of the Romney-Ryan tax plan: the complete elimination of taxes on the overseas operations of U.S. corporations.

The Romney home page calls for the nation to 'switch to a territorial tax system,' which translates into an end to taxation of the profits piled up offshore by American-based corporations. This radical step would create huge incentives to ship U.S. jobs overseas, where they would never face U.S. taxes, and to manipulate corporate earnings reports to claim that profits generated in the U.S. were actually produced offshore.[...]

Tax expert David Cay Johnston, Reuters correspondent and author of the just-published Fine Print: How Big Companies Use 'Plain English' to Rob Us Blind, warns, 'The Romney-Ryan plan would insure that any profits created offshore by U.S. corporations would never be taxed by the U.S. government. This would create a tremendous incentive to move more and more U.S. jobs overseas to escape taxes on the profits that foreign workers produce for them.'

The shift to 'territoriality' would also unleash an even higher level of corporate manipulation of the tax system than prevails now, where as many costs as possible are ascribed to U.S. operations and the profits credited to their foreign subsidiaries. Major multinational corporations like Apple and GE and Nike use a variety of accounting tricks'especially, setting up hundreds of shell corporations--to essentially launder their profits before moving their lightly taxed money home.

The imposition of a 'territorial' tax system exempting U.S. firms' foreign operations thus would make the current system infinitely worse, both in terms of job loss and shrinkage of taxes paid by major corporations.

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