News that Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, plans to buy Britain’s AstraZeneca for $106 billion, renounce its U.S. citizenship, and declare itself a British company, has jolted Congress. Pfizer is being denounced as disloyal to the land of its birth, and politicians are devising ways to stop Pfizer from departing.
Yet Pfizer is not alone. Hedge fund managers are urging giant corporations like Walgreens to go nation-shopping for new residences abroad to evade the 35 percent U.S. corporate income tax. Britain’s corporate income tax is 20 percent, and Pfizer stands to save over $1 billion a year by moving there.
In what are called “inversions,” dozens of U.S. companies have bought up foreign rivals, and then moved abroad to countries with lower tax rates, cutting revenue to the U.S. Treasury. But Pfizer is far and away the biggest.
The real question, however, is not why companies are fleeing the USA, but why our politicians continue to drive them out of the country.
[...]
Looking back, consider what our political class has done to our once self-sufficient American Republic. We impose on businesses, our principal job creators, the most punitive corporate tax rate in the West. Through “free trade,” we tell U.S. companies that if they wish to avoid our taxes and get around our minimum wage, health, safety, and environmental laws, they can move to China, produce there, and bring their products back free of charge—and kill their competitors too patriotic to leave America.
“The Decline and Fall of the United States of America” is going to be a piece of cake for future historians to write.
