Walgreens, a pharmacy chain that has been headquartered in my home state of Illinois since its founding, has threatened to move its corporate headquarters from the United States to Switzerland in order to evade U.S. corporate taxes.
While Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois has proposed legislation to discourage these so-called "inversions", in which U.S. companies merge with foreign companies and then set up their new headquarters overseas, I'm going to go even further than Durbin's proposal, which, if enacted, would prohibit companies that undergo inversions from accepting federal contracts, and propose enacting a globalization tax, which would require companies that conduct any business in the United States to pay U.S. corporate taxes, regardless of which country their headquarters is located.
While the globalization tax wouldn't completely do away with economic globalization, it would certainly put the reins on the economic globalization that is hurting our country's economy and costing our country millions upon millions of dollars in tax revenue. While Senator Durbin's proposal is certainly a step in the right direction, we can certainly do more to discourage companies that do business in our country from moving overseas to avoid paying corporate taxes here.
