When an American Company Redomiciles to the Cayman Islands, What Lesson Should We Learn?

Another American company has decided to expatriate for tax reasons. This process has been going on for decades, with companies giving up their U.S. charters (a form of business citizenship) and redomiciling in low-tax jurisdictions such as Bermuda, Ireland, Switzerland, Panama, Hong Kong, and the Cayman Islands.

The companies that choose to expatriate usually fit a certain profile (this applies to individuals as well). They earn a substantial share of their income in other countries and they are put at a competitive disadvantage because of America’s “worldwide” tax system.

More specifically, worldwide taxation requires firms to not only pay tax to foreign governments on their foreign-source income, but they are also supposed to pay additional tax on this income to the IRS – even though the money was not earned in America and even though their foreign-based competitors rarely are subject to this type of double taxation.

In this most recent example, an energy company with substantial operations in Asia moved its charter to the Cayman Islands, as reported by digitaljournal.com.

Greenfields Petroleum Corporation…, an independent exploration and production company with assets in Azerbaijan, is pleased to announce that the previously announced corporate redomestication…from Delaware to the Cayman Islands has been successfully completed.

Because it is a small firm, the move by GPC probably won’t attract much attention from the politicians. But “corporate expatriation” has generated considerable controversy in recent years when involving big companies such as Ingersoll-Rand, Transocean, and Stanley Works (now Stanley Black & Decker).

Statists argue that it is unpatriotic for companies to redomicile, and they changed the law last decade to make it more difficult for companies to escape the clutches of the IRS. In addition to blaming “Benedict Arnold” corporations, leftists also attack low-tax jurisdictions for “poaching” companies.

Libertarians and conservatives, by contrast, explain that expatriation is the result of an onerous tax system that imposes high tax rates and requires the double taxation of foreign-source income. Expatriation is the only logical approach if companies want a level playing field when competing in global markets.

I cover this issue (and also explain that the Obama Administration is trying to make a bad system even worse) in the video below.

My recommendation, not surprisingly, is that politicians fix the tax code. Unfortunately, politicians prefer the blame-the-victim game, so they attack the companies instead of solving the underlying problem (and then they wonder why job creation is anemic).

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Another Compelling Reason to Shut Down the Department of Housing and Urban Development

I’ve already explained why the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be eliminated, but a superb column in the Wall Street Journal by my old friend Jim Bovard has my blood boiling.

After reading Jim’s piece, I no longer want to merely abolish HUD. I want to bulldoze the building, cover the ground with six feet of broken glass and rusty nails, and then add a foot of salt to make sure nothing can possibly spring forth again.

In the 1990s, the feds were embarrassed by skyrocketing crime rates in public housing—up to 10 times the national average, according to HUD studies and many newspaper reports. The government’s response was to hand out vouchers to residents…, dispersing them to safer and more upscale locales. Section 8’s budget soared to $19 billion this year from $7 billion in 1994. HUD now picks up the rent for more than two million households nationwide; tenants pay 30% of their income toward rent and utilities while the feds pay the rest. Section 8 recipients receive monthly rental subsidies of up to $2,851 in the Stamford-Norwalk, Conn., area, $2,764 in Honolulu and $2,582 in Columbia, Md. But the dispersal of public housing residents to quieter neighborhoods has failed to weed out the criminal element that made life miserable for most residents of the projects. “Homicide was simply moved to a new location, not eliminated,” concluded University of Louisville criminologist Geetha Suresh in a 2009 article in Homicide Studies. In Louisville, Memphis, and other cities, violent crime skyrocketed in neighborhoods where Section 8 recipients resettled. After a four-year investigation, the Indianapolis Housing Authority (IHA) in 2006 linked 80% of criminal homicides in Marion County, Ind., to individuals fraudulently obtaining federal assistance “in either the public housing program or the Section 8 program administered by the agency.”

In other words, the federal government decided that it wasn’t doing enough damage by being a slumlord. It then decided to directly subsidize rents (often at scandalously high levels), often for the benefit of criminals.

Not surprisingly, proponents of big government are playing the race card, claiming that opposition to rental subsidies is a form of discrimination since a disproportionate share of recipients are minorities. Yet this controversy actually pits law-abiding people, regardless of color, against social-engineering bureaucrats.

…middle-class blacks are the program’s least inhibited critics. Sheldon Carter of Antelope Valley, Calif., testified at a recent public hearing on local Section 8 controversies: “This is not a racial issue. It is a color issue. The color is green and it’s my dollars.” Shirlee Bolds told Iowa’s Dubuque Telegraph Herald in 2009: “I moved away from the city to get away from all this crap. Dubuque’s getting rough. I think it’s turning into a little Chicago, like they’re bringing the street rep here.” Remarkably, HUD seems bent on creating a new civil right—the right to raise hell in subsidized housing in nice neighborhoods.

The bureaucracy’s perverse definition of civil rights is not a recent development, as illustrated by this previous post critiquing HUD’s bean-counting mentality.

The moral of the story, though, is that the federal government has no business being involved in housing. Jim’s closing sentences are a pretty good summary of this outrageous situation.

The Obama administration is now launching a pilot program giving local housing authorities wide discretion to pay higher rent subsidies to allow Section 8 beneficiaries to move into even more affluent zip codes. Hasn’t this program helped wreck enough neighborhoods?

Heck, let’s also add arsenic, lead, and strychnine to the glass, nails, and salt. Maybe some radioactive material as well. No sense taking any chances.

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