The Highway Bill presents an immediately available opportunity to pass international tax reform that will stop inversions.
Dear Senators and Congressmen,
Unfortunately, my warnings concerning the fact that there will be a large number of our companies leaving the country within the next year is already coming true. Just this morning, both Pfizer and Allergan confirmed they are in “preliminary friendly discussions” about merging. Allergan is domiciled in Ireland, and if consummated, this will be the largest corporate inversion to date, and as a result our country will lose Pfizer, its tenth largest company. The imminent planned exodus of many of our best companies is extremely dangerous, especially in our fragile economy, as it will cause the loss of thousands of jobs, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars of future tax revenue and investment in the United States. As I said in my October 20th letter, it’s not too late if we act now.
I would like to thank the many of you who called me to voice your support for my October 20th letter in which I announced my $150 million PAC and expressed my strong opposition to corporate tax inversions. I found it encouraging that every single member of both the House and the Senate to whom I spoke, both Republicans and Democrats, agreed with strong conviction that inversions present a grave risk to our country in the near term, and also agreed that the framework proposed by Senator Chuck Schumer and Senator Robert Portman, and supported by Speaker Paul Ryan, for international tax reform would put an end to these inversions. Given the news this morning that we are now losing Pfizer, one of the pillars of our pharmaceutical industry, to corporate inversion, we must act now.
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