Small Business And Infrastructure Jobs Tax Act Of 2010

Floor Speech

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Madam Speaker, regarding these ill-considered arguments against the treaty-shopping provisions that allow a handful of firms to dodge their responsibilities to fund our national and homeland security, let's get the facts straight.

First, there is not one company headquartered in the United States that will pay one cent of additional taxes as a result of these provisions. Number two, there is not one company that is headquartered in a foreign country with whom we have a tax treaty that will pay one cent of additional taxes. And that covers, by the way, over 90 percent of all foreign investment in the United States that we were just hearing about, over 90 percent not touched whatsoever if they are headquartered in a country with a tax treaty.

What it does touch is the minority, defended by the Republican Party, that are determined to dodge their fair share of the cost of running America. Those are companies that are headquartered in tax havens that set up their operations specifically to dodge their tax responsibility. We believe they ought to follow the same rules as American-owned companies, as American-headquartered companies.

It is amazing to me that the same folks who would defend the flim-flam artists at Enron from dodging their tax responsibilities, that would defend the American corporations that renounce their American citizenship to move to some sunny tax haven, are now defending this small minority of firms that will not pay their fair share of American taxes.

And what of this phony argument that we are somehow violating our tax treaty responsibilities: well, it is just that, it is phony because this measure is actually an incentive to support the tax treaty system. That is where over 90 percent of the investment already is; and so we are saying, as the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation concluded, this provides an incentive for any responsible foreign investor to locate in a treaty country. The treaties are set up to help American companies. That is what these companies should do.

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The last Administration offered proposals to address this time after time, and a Republican Congress wouldn't approve them. That is one of the reasons we need to take this firm action today. We see the benefits of doing that in the almost $8 billion that are raised not from American companies but from companies that are located in these tax-haven locations.

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We are in no way saying that this is the same legislative language that the Bush Administration recommended. We are saying it addresses the same problem and that you didn't like the Bush Administration approach any better than you liked the Obama Administration approach, any better than you like this approach. And the only beneficiaries of this obstruction to a legislative answer are the same tax dodgers in these tax havens that have been avoiding their responsibility. We want to level the playing field. We don't want to shirk treaty responsibilities. We want an incentive to encourage every one of these companies to go to a tax treaty country.

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