FLASHBACK: Corporations Used 2004 Tax Holiday To Repatriate Billions, Then Laid Off Thousands Of Workers

A slew of multinational corporations — who have crafted a campaign known as “WinAmerica” — are lobbying hard for Congress to enact a tax repatriation holiday, which would allow multinational corporations to bring money they have stashed offshore back to the U.S. at a dramatically lower tax rate. (Usually corporations pay the statutory 35 percent rate on repatriated earnings.)

However, the Congressional Research Service looked at a repatriation holiday approved by Congress in 2004 and found “little evidence exists that new investment was spurred.” In fact, many of the largest companies that took advantage of that holiday wound up cutting tens of thousands of jobs over the subsequent two years, as this table shows:

Overall, corporations used 92 percent of the money they brought back under the tax holiday to enrich their executives and buy back their own shares, not to invest in job creation. Several of the companies in the WinAmerica coalition already pay exceedingly low taxes due to the various loopholes and credits in the corporate tax code and through their use of offshore tax havens. The Joint Economic Committee found that a repatriation holiday would cost $78.7 billion.

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