After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working.
While we’re on the subject of revolving doors, Bloomberg has an article about the push for a tax holiday for multi-national companies. It’s being pushed by lobbyists who are former Congressional staffers. Jeffrey Forbes, once chief of staff to Max Baucus, chairman of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, is lobbying for Google, Apple, and Cisco Systems.
Data compiled by Bloomberg News show that Forbes is part of an army of more than 160 lobbyists, including at least 60 who once worked for a sitting member of the House or Senate, pushing for the repatriation holiday. Their job is to persuade Congress to establish a tax break estimated to cost the U.S. government $78.7 billion over the next decade.
Naturally, the bill is gaining traction with both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, and the lobbyists come from both parties.
The tax holiday would allow mulit-nationals to “repatriate” money that they offshored as “foreign profit.”
The proposed holiday would reward the companies that have most aggressively parked profits in tax havens such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, said Martin A. Sullivan, a former Treasury Department economist and contributing editor for the non-partisan Tax Notes.
“A lot of what companies report as foreign profit is really U.S. profit that should be subject to U.S. tax,” Sullivan said. “Those earnings didn’t get overseas by accident. Many of these companies intentionally put them there to avoid paying U.S. taxes.”
Supporters of the bill argue that the holiday would bring more than $1 billion into the economy.
“It would do much to regenerate the economy,” said Robert Livingston, a former Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and speaker-designate who is now lobbying for Oracle Corp. (ORCL) “A total of $1.5 trillion from all affected U.S. companies would go a long way to pull us out of the doldrums.”
What a world.
