Steve Forbes tells Newsmax that reforms to America's "silly" corporate tax code could bring in billions of dollars in "free money."
The Forbes magazine editor and former presidential candidate says in an exclusive interview: "What you have here is a very silly thing. We have a tax law regarding overseas profits that no other [advanced] country has ... except maybe one. In most countries, if you make a profit overseas you pay the tax overseas, but they don't tax it again at home. We're about the only country that does that.
"Ten years ago we had an amnesty where companies could bring back overseas profits and pay a 5.5 percent tax. A lot of them did so, and $18 billion came into the Treasury — free money, so to speak — and $300 billion came back to the United States.
"Now we have almost $2 trillion sitting overseas and we have the spectacle of Apple floating a $17 billion bond issue to pay dividends and do stock buybacks when they have over $135 billion in cash on their balance sheets, but most of it is overseas. If they brought it back, they'd have to pay a 35, 40 percent tax on it.
"So we do need major reform there. Instead of having a one-time amnesty, let's join the rest of the world and have the same kind of tax treatment the rest of the world has, and then you'd see a lot of those hundreds of billions of dollars come back to the United States. And if we had a proper tax code reform, that money would be quickly invested."
See video below.
Editor's Note: See the full Newsmax interview and excerpts:
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