Reply #12: You nailed it. [View All]

[sad sally]

But the Post misses by not reporting what studies have shown about the last repatriation holiday, when companies brought home hundreds of billions of dollars after a 2004 giveaway.

Back then, companies were supposed to directly create jobs with the money they repatriated. Instead they played the financialization game: paying it out in dividends and buying back shares. There’s no doubt that shareholders spent some of this money and would do so again this time, stimulating the economy to some extent. But the Congressional Research Service says “the repatriations did not increase domestic investment or employment.”

The companies that brought big bucks home ended up cutting jobs in the wake of the tax holiday, according to the CRS report. I guess it’s possible that the companies would have cut even more jobs had they not run into this windfall, but that’s not much of a selling point, and it’s countered by what the companies did with the money.