“Caterpillar Inc. is likely to get some Republican support Tuesday when the giant maker of construction and mining equipment faces criticism of its accounting policies at a Senate subcommittee hearing,” James R. Hagerty reports for MarketWatch. “A report on Caterpillar’s tax-avoidance strategies, to be released before the hearing of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has been spearheaded by Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the panel. But Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is the ranking minority member on the subcommittee, is expected to dissent from at least some of Sen. Levin’s criticism.”
“The two Senators usually work well together, a spokesman for Sen. McCain said Thursday, but ‘they disagree on this one,'” Hagerty reports. “He said Sen. McCain doesn’t believe Caterpillar’s tax practices are as ‘egregious’ as Sen. Levin does. Tax Analysts, a newsletter, earlier reported that Sen. McCain was ‘distancing himself’ from the report.”
“In May 2013, both Sens. Levin and McCain were critical of Apple Inc. when the subcommittee issued a report on that company’s tax-reduction strategies,” Hagerty reports. “The subcommittee’s investigation found no evidence that Apple did anything illegal. Apple told the panel that it paid all taxes due and argued the U.S. tax code needed a ‘dramatic simplification.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: More worthless, money-wasting belching, bloviating, and grandstanding.
U.S. corporations avoid U.S. corporate taxes because they are too high, geniuses.
In November 2012, Tim Worstall wrote an interesting article for The Register. In case you missed it:
Google, Apple, eBay shouldn’t pay taxes – people should pay taxes.
—
Under the current U.S. corporate tax system, it would be very expensive to repatriate that cash. Unfortunately, the tax code has not kept up with the digital age. The tax system handicaps American corporations in relation to our foreign competitors who don’t have such constraints on the free flow of capital… Apple has always believed in the simple, not the complex. You can see it in our products and the way we conduct ourselves. It is in this spirit that we recommend a dramatic simplification of the corporate tax code. This reform should be revenue neutral, eliminate all corporate tax expenditures, lower corporate income tax rates and implement a reasonable tax on foreign earnings that allows the free flow of capital back to the U.S. We make this recommendation with our eyes wide open, realizing this would likely increase Apple’s U.S. taxes. But we strongly believe such comprehensive reform would be fair to all taxpayers, would keep America globally competitive and would promote U.S. economic growth. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, May 21, 2013
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