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Tech Firms Keep Piles of 'Foreign Cash' In US
theodp writes "There's a funny thing about the estimated $1.7 trillion that American companies say they have indefinitely invested overseas,' reports the WSJ's Kate Linebaugh (reg. or the old Google trick). 'A lot of it is actually sitting right here at home.' And if tech companies like Google and Microsoft want to keep more than three-quarters of the cash owned by their foreign subsidiaries at U.S. banks, held in U.S. dollars or parked in U.S. government and corporate securities, Linebaugh explains, this money is still overseas in the eyes of the IRS and isn't taxed as long as it doesn't flow back to the U.S. parent company. Helping corporations avoid the need to tap their foreign-held cash are low interest rates at home, which have allowed U.S. companies to borrow cheaply. Oracle, for instance, raised $5 billion last year, paying an interest rate roughly two-thirds of a percentage point above the low post-crash Treasury yield, about 2.5% at the time (by contrast, grad students and parents pay 6.8%-7.9% for Federal student loans). Were the funds it manages to keep in the hands of its foreign subsidiaries brought home and subjected to U.S. income tax, Oracle estimated it could owe Uncle Sam about $6.3 billion."
No.
We have TANF(Temporary Assistance for Need Families) and unemployment insurance.
Both are temporary and the first is only for families. The latter is also not available in most states if you quit, are fired for cause, or were not working for more than some amount of time, normally a year.
The loopholes exist because of the economic benefits. RTFA, the USA is the only economy in the developed world to try to tax foreign earned income the same as domestically earned income. This is true for citizens and green card holders too, by the way, which places US citizens into the unique and perverse situation of moving abroad and still paying Uncle Sam taxes, despite getting no services for that tax.
For US persons, this is merely an unfair affront to basic common sense. For US companies it's the difference between being competitive or being double taxed into total lack of competitive-ness. So these "loopholes" as you call them have been around for a long time and don't get closed because they're the thing that's keeping US business on a level playing field with the rest of the world.
You're right that the US tax system should be simplified and loopholes removed. If the US gave up on trying to tax income regardless of where it was earned, it'd be the same as every other tax system and there'd be no need to maintain these "loopholes", they'd just go away naturally. Also, US companies would be more likely to spend foreign earned money in the USA because there'd be no double taxation. And US citizens would not be trapped by the financial "Berlin Wall" that is resulting in them being systematically evicted from the worlds financial institutions. It'd be a win all round, but of course, nobody in Congress is talking about doing that because it'd be revenue neutral.