This article just made me think of the recently passed "energy bill" chock full of tax breaks. It's nice to see our tax dollars well spent by Republicans who constantly harp about spending our tax dollars well. After all its MY money, right?
Multinationals Got a Tax Break,But Jobs Still Seem to Go Abroad
July 29, 2005
Plenty of the dollars of foreign earnings being "repatriated" to the U.S. are passing jobs headed in the other direction.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. The American Jobs Creation Act, passed in October, gave U.S. multinationals a one-time tax break on those earnings, allowing firms to bring the money home and pay taxes on it at a greatly reduced rate. The thinking by Congress was that companies would use the freed-up earnings -- much of which had been abroad for years -- to invest in new hires and otherwise expand in the U.S. This quarter alone, 105 companies have announced plans to bring home $95 billion.
But some of the biggest repatriators -- including Dell Inc., Apple Computer Inc. and Honeywell International Inc. -- have also been among the most active companies in offshoring their labor force. They are hiring workers and subcontracting manufacturing in India, China and other low-wage countries.
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"The idea of just blindly giving tax breaks in the hopes it's going to spur job creation simply doesn't work," says Marcus Courtney, president of the antioffshoring Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a high-tech-labor affiliate of the Communications Workers of America.
