John B. Breaux: “this is a jobs bill. That is the title of the bill. Presumably a jobs bill is intended to create jobs and hopefully is…”

“this is a jobs bill. That is the title of the bill. Presumably a jobs bill is intended to create jobs and hopefully is created to create jobs in America. That is the legislation that is before us. It is absolutely essential that this legislation be adopted. But one of the provisions in the legislation gives me great concern. I offered an amendment in the Finance Committee. It was unanimously supported by every single Democrat in the Finance Committee and it lost by a partisan vote because our Republican colleagues at that time did not feel they could support the amendment I offered. It was unanimously supported by every single Democrat member of the Finance Committee. The question deals with how we treat companies that have earnings they have stashed away in foreign countries. These amounts of money, many of them, are in fact earned overseas. Companies know if they bring those earnings back to the United States, the United States, on a worldwide tax basis, will tax those earnings with a deduction for the amount of tax they have paid in the country in which they earned those revenues. They pay the regular corporate rate minus the tax credit they get for having paid taxes on those earnings in the foreign country. However, there is no tax consequence to those companies if the money in fact stays in the foreign country. That is called deferral. We defer any U.S. tax on foreign earnings as long as the earnings stay in the foreign country in which they are earned.”