‘Why not make the United States the largest enterprise zone on earth?’
News that Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, plans to buy Britain’s AstraZeneca for $106 billion, renounce its U.S. citizenship and declare itself a British company has jolted Congress.
Pfizer is being denounced as disloyal to the land of its birth, and politicians are devising ways to stop Pfizer from departing.
Yet Pfizer is not alone. Hedge fund managers are urging giant corporations like Walgreens to go nation-shopping for new residences abroad to evade the 35 percent U.S. corporate income tax.
Britain’s corporate income tax is 20 percent, and Pfizer stands to save over $1 billion a year by moving there.
In what are called “inversions,” dozens of U.S. companies have bought up foreign rivals and then moved abroad to countries with lower tax rates, cutting revenue to the U.S. Treasury.
But Pfizer is far and away the biggest.
The real question, however, is not why companies are fleeing the USA, but why our politicians continue to drive them out of the country.
Consider. Here in America we do not tax charities, churches or colleges. Yet these institutions produce a fraction of the jobs that businesses produce.
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