This Loophole Buried in Trump's Bill Is Anything but Beautiful

It is hard to think of a less coherent pair of policies: President Trump's tax policy encourages the very offshoring that his tariffs are intended to stop.
Take the more than $600 billion pharmaceutical industry. Over the past few months, Mr. Trump and his associates have repeatedly criticized companies' moves to offshore much drug making, particularly to Ireland. 'We can't be beholden and rely upon foreign countries for fundamental things that we need,' Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on April 13.
But the tax incentives in Mr. Trump's 2017 tax and spending package helped generate this problem in the first place — a problem that would continue under the Republican bill under consideration. Mr. Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created a loophole that made it far more profitable for the pharmaceutical giants, including Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson and Merck, to manufacture some of their most profitable drugs in Ireland. Unsurprisingly, that is what happened, with America's imports of pharmaceuticals soaring to $250 billion in 2024, way up from $110 billion back in 2016.
American firms now report earning about $350 billion in profits annually in the world's major centers of corporate tax avoidance, which include Ireland, Luxembourg, Singapore and a handful of others. And while the major drug companies have mastered the art of taking advantage of the loopholes created by the 2017 law, semiconductor equipment producers and other Big Tech companies use the same special tax break.
Fortunately, it isn't too late to make sensible changes that would raise revenue and get rid of this strange incentive.
Republicans tend to blame Ireland's lower corporate tax rate for the proliferation of corporate tax avoidance, but the real incentive comes from this obscure corner of our tax code. It offers a far-lower 10.5 percent tax rate for global profits if a global firm moves the profits from its intellectual property offshore. The tax rate for domestic profits, in contrast, is 21 percent. The tax break was created by Republicans who were searching for a compromise that would stop companies from moving their headquarters overseas without fully ending tax competition and the associated pressure on U.S. corporate tax rates.
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