LAT OpEd: "CORP TAX CHEATING HURTS ALL OF US-Romney shows contempt for a basic principle of tax law"

OP-ED
Tax planning? Or tax cheating?
Laws that encourage corporate tax havens are bad for America.

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For citizens hoping for serious tax policy and budget debates, this has been a dispiriting election cycle. One party urges tax rates too low to support any plausible platform from which government can deliver the services we all expect.

Those are the Democrats.

The other party inhabits a realm of fantasy akin to Erewhon, the fictional land created by the 19th century satirist Samuel Butler. In Erewhon, Butler wrote, "If a man has made a fortune … they exempt him from all taxation, considering him as a work of art, and too precious to be meddled with; they say, 'How very much he must have done for society before society could have been prevailed upon to give him so much money.'"

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When Romney endorses the idea that U.S. firms are doing right by reporting their profits overwhelmingly in tax havens, he shows contempt for a basic principle of tax law. This encourages still more aggressive profit shifting and stateless income tax planning. The missing tax revenue must be made up by domestic firms and individual Americans.

That may be the right thing to do in Erewhon, but in the real world, corporate tax cheating hurts us all.


MORE:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kleinbard-tax-cheats-20120907,0,6526020.story