Morici: Obama, GOP Make No Sense on Taxes and Spending

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Republicans are from Venus and President Obama is from Mars. Nothing better demonstrates this than their stances on taxes, spending and jobs.

Obama wants to reform corporate taxes -- shut loopholes, impose a mandatory levy on profits earned abroad and lower rates overall -- but to also raise some additional revenue to fund his jobs initiatives.

The corporate tax code is too complex and encourages tax avoidance more than sound investments. However, rates are much higher than in competing nations, and the United States taxes profits earned outside its territory whereas other governments do not.

All this encourages U.S. multinationals to invest and create jobs abroad and keep profits parked there, where they can't foster American growth and jobs. Firms such as Eaton (ETN) and Sara Lee, now Hillshire Farms (HSH), have even moved corporate headquarters to low tax jurisdictions.

By collecting more taxes on U.S. and foreign operations, the president would encourage more factories and firms to leave the country, save their marketing activities. Obama wants to spend the revenue bonanza on much needed but poorly conceived infrastructure projects -- federally supported projects import too many materials from China and require Davis-Bacon union jobs -- education and jobs training. The purpose of stimulus money is not to boost employment in the Middle Kingdom, and after the Detroit and General Motors (GM) bankruptcies, no sane person would advocate strengthening unions. American schools and universities suffer not from too little money. The real problems are: regulations and school cultures that handicap teachers from intelligently addressing a diverse student population; politically conservative parents who place too much emphasis on sports, liberal parents who value too much community service, and neither valuing enough academic excellence; and schools and universities run by incompetent bureaucrats. The federal government already has too many jobs training programs that don't train much of anyone for a job. For its part, the GOP House wants to extract spending cuts to reduce the budget deficit but won't accept measures really needed to accomplish political success -- higher payroll taxes and more prudent health care regulations.

Source: http://feeds.thestreet.com/~r/tsc/feeds/rss/latest-stories/~3/db7lZed48y8/morici-obama-gop-make-no-sense-on-taxes-and-spending.html

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