As discussed in the previous piece, Trump administration economic officials argue that by lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent and moving to what is called a territorial system—mainly, companies pay taxes on foreign earnings only to the foreign nation where those profits are booked and never owe anything to the U.S. no matter how low the foreign nation’s tax rate is—would lead to more jobs and profits staying in or coming back to the United States.
Yet, it is clear that a territorial system could have just the opposite impact: It could give a permanent preference to foreign income and lead companies to shift more profits to tax havens knowing that they could permanently avoid virtually all taxation on such profits. One crucial safeguard against that perverse impact is to apply a strong minimum tax on the profits of U.S. multinationals in each country (a “country-by-country” minimum tax). If a U.S. company had to pay a minimum tax of, let’s say, 19 percent (as President Obama had proposed), even if they engaged in complex tax planning to book $100 million in profits in zero-tax Bermuda, they would have to pay $19 million in U.S. taxes to ensure the 19 percent minimum tax was enforced. Under such a country-by-country minimum tax, you can run, you can shift profits to tax havens, but you cannot hide from paying a 19 percent minimum no matter where you are. Under this type of true minimum tax on foreign earnings, U.S. multinationals would have little incentive to engage in the ongoing race to the bottom.
As discussed in my previous Atlantic piece, the GOP plan was rumored to use only a 10 percent minimum tax, and to make it worse, would make the minimum tax determination based on the average of a company’s total global profits. What was problematic about this design was that it not only encouraged companies to move profits to tax havens, but it actually encouraged them to simultaneously move jobs and operations such as manufacturing to industrialized countries that had typical tax rates and to shift more profits to tax havens. Why? Because if you had $100 million of profits in Bermuda facing no tax, you might have still had to pay $10 million in U.S. taxes to meet the new global minimum tax. But if you moved a factory to Germany that made $100 million and paid 20 percent in taxes there, you could still pay zero on your profits in Bermuda because the average taxes paid on your global profits (from both Bermuda and Germany) would be the global minimum rate of 10 percent. This perverse design means the more a U.S. multinational shifts jobs and operations to industrialized nations with similar tax rates to the U.S., the more it can get away with shifting more and more profits to tax havens.
