Corporations Renew Push For Tax Holiday A Day After CBO Says It Would Have Negligible Effect On Job Creation

The coalition of corporations pushing for a temporary repatriation tax holiday on money that companies have stashed offshore renewed its efforts in a letter to Congress and the White House today, a day after the Congressional Budget Office released a study showing that such a holiday would have a minimal impact on job creation. Executives at Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco Systems, and Pfizer are among the 15 executives that signed the letter, which asserts that Congress can’t wait any longer to push the holiday through, the Wall Street Journal reports:

CEOs seeking a tax holiday on their overseas earnings are sending a not-so-subtle message to Congress and the White House: We can spend the money here in the U.S. or we can spend it over there.

In a letter released Wednesday, the CEOs write that “the simple truth is that the longer we wait, the more money will be spent overseas, and these foreign investments are unlikely to return to the U.S. even if our tax policies are changed to encourage domestic investment in the future.”

Just yesterday, the CBO found that the repatriation holiday would have the weakest effect on job creation of all the major policy proposals made by both parties.

That analysis echoes the effects of the last such holiday, which was also sold as a job creation measure. According to President Bush’s own economic advisers, however, the 2004 holiday “didn’t accomplish its stated goals of bringing jobs and investment to the U.S.,” as large corporations used the repatriated funds to pay dividends and purchase stock before actuallycutting jobs and moving even more money overseas.