They don't owe any taxes if they keep the money outside the country.
People tend to think of taxes like "skimming" off the top, and like some kind of inevitable thing that doesn't affect your decisions. But that is the wrong way to think about it: when taxes are high enough to have a significant impact, they do affect taxpayer decisions.
You seem to be saying that they should keep making decisions as if there were no taxes, and then pay high taxes because of those decisions. But that's completely unrealistic.
When taxes are higher than a trivial amount, the correct way to think about them is as policy that will have lots of effects; some obvious and some not obvious.
Exactly, taxes act as incentives and de-incentives.
Why do we have a health care system based on employer based insurance? Because employer based healthcare is tax deductible, and personal health care is not.
What effect does the home mortgage interest deduction, and home sale capital income tax holiday have on the price of houses -- they result in higher housing prices because they provide incentive for more leverage and reaching for the highest appreciation.
What is the result of the decision for us to tax personal income rather than personal consumption -- more consumption and less saving.
What we tax and how we tax it has a very real impact on behavior around that thing.
The long term effect of large amounts of cash overseas due to having a higher tax rate here is ultimately to build more operations overseas, to use it. That is how the incentive is set up.
Not a fan of a tax holiday, but am a fan of reducing that incentive by bringing our corporate rates lower.
We have employer based health insurance in the US because insurance works on a group level, not individual level, when the risk being insured is not under the control of the consumer.
We have employer-based health care, and transit subsidy, and meal subsidy, and all that crap, because of stupid tax laws, yes.
They don't owe any taxes if they keep the money outside the country.
People tend to think of taxes like "skimming" off the top, and like some kind of inevitable thing that doesn't affect your decisions. But that is the wrong way to think about it: when taxes are high enough to have a significant impact, they do affect taxpayer decisions.
You seem to be saying that they should keep making decisions as if there were no taxes, and then pay high taxes because of those decisions. But that's completely unrealistic.
When taxes are higher than a trivial amount, the correct way to think about them is as policy that will have lots of effects; some obvious and some not obvious.