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The Effects Of The American Jobs Creation Act

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In 2004, under George W. Bush’s administration, the American Jobs Creation Act was passed. This Act was created with the intent to boost the United States Economy by allowing a corporation with profits overseas one year to repatriate at a noticeably low tax rate. While the corporations did repatriate a sizeable amount of money back into the United States, they used the low tax rate to repurchase their own stock or to pay larger dividends to their shareholders. The tax holiday did cause a large boost in revenue for the United States Treasury. However, the American Jobs Creation Act did not do what is so clearly in its title, it did not create jobs or invest further in the United States. With political changes happening in the White House …show more content…

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The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 decreased the tax liability for foreign earnings repatriated into the United States. This one time decrease lowered the maximum tax rate for overseas profit from 35 percent to 5.25 percent. However, due to foreign tax credits, the average tax rate corporations actually paid was 3.7 percent. The largest two types of corporations to repatriate their foreign earnings were the pharmaceutical and technology sectors. According to a news article written by Lynnley Browning in 2008, “the tax break gave each company claiming it an average $370 million in tax deductions” (Browning 2008). During 2004 the number of United States Corporations with foreign subsidiaries totaled around 9700. As stated above only 843 corporations participated in the Repatriation Tax Holiday. Of these 843, over 30 percent of total repatriation is accounted for by the pharmaceutical manufacturers alone. On average these 29 pharmaceutical manufacturers each claimed a tax deduction on overseas profits of $3 billion.

The 2004 Act faced both scrutiny and support. The results from the Act can be looked at two different ways. On one hand, the tax break brought money into the Treasury coffers that would not have been recognized without the Repatriation Tax Holiday. The money brought into the Treasury coffers amounted to around $18 billion. Also, while some critics say that corporations used the tax break

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