In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a minimum tax for foreign profits of U.S. corporations:
First, if you’re a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn’t get a tax deduction for doing it…. No American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax.
Here’s a video of my appearance yesterday on Bloomberg’s “Bottom Line” program with Mark Crumpton. We discussed some of the problems with the federal pension system.
Last week, I visited Israel last week as part of a Harvard Business School trip on the subject of innovation. One of the groups we met was a new venture capital fund called Sadara Ventures (which is a name that connotes “pioneering” in Arabic). Sadara focuses on Palestinian investments—mainly in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank.
Choose one: How would you best describe exchange-traded funds?
A. Traditional
B. Alternative
C. Conservative
D. Aggressive
E. All of the above
2011 was a tough year for private defined benefit pension plans (DB plans). According to a report from Credit Suisse, the funding gap for the DB plans of S&P 500 companies rose from $250 billion at the end of 2010 to $450 billion at the end of 2011. Note that this is much higher than the shortfall during the peak of the financial crisis, which was estimated at $274 billion.
Now that Rick Santorum has emerged as the latest candidate to challenge Mitt Romney, we should take a closer look at what he believes about tax policy. To his credit, Santorum’s policy proposals are less radical than those of the previous anti-Romney’s—Perry, Cain, and Gingrich. For the most part, his plan resembles mainstream conservatism. But two policies suggest a role for the government that may prove unacceptably large to conservative voters.
With Newt Gingrich vying for front-runner status in the Republican presidential primaries, his positions on important public policies such as Social Security and income taxes deserve scrutiny. In both cases, Gingrich adopts familiar Republican concepts — but then undermines their key objectives.
This past week we have been seeing the fallout from the failure of the Supercommittee to reach any sort of agreement.
Senate Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on a one year extension of the 2% decrease in payroll taxes but could not agree on the financing. Democrats want to charge a 1.9% surcharge on income above $1,000,000 for ten years, while Republicans want to freeze the pay of federal workers for two years.