US companies are awash with cash: A tax holiday please!

US companies have so much cash they are buying up foreign concerns such as Microsoft’s purchase of the Luxembourg based Skype Technologies. They are using their huge offshore money cache for the buying spree. As readers are aware, US corporations are pressing the US government to institute what they call a “tax holiday” on the repatriation of profits they make abroad.In the meantime, they'll use the money to make more.

The way things stand at the moment is that federal income tax on overseas earnings can be deferred indefinitely but is taxed at 39% if they bring it back to the US. They get credit for foreign income taxes they pay but these corporations don’t go abroad to raise the wages of workers or pay high taxes. A financial advisor with JP Morgan estimates that non financial companies in Standard and Poor’s 500-stock index keep 40% to 60% of their $1.3 trillion in cash overseas (about $780 billion) so as to hold off paying US taxes. The big tech companies like Apple and Cisco and the drug manufacturer Pfizer have been pushing the US government to allow them to bring the money home at a tax rate of 5.2%, quite a tax holiday indeed.

The figures are quite staggering according to Business Week, some examples:

                            Apple       Microsoft      Cisco         Oracle Google
Offshore cash    $47.6 bn     $45 bn          $38.8 bn     $20.4 bn $18.8 bn
Domestic cash   $28.6 bn     $7.8 bn         $4.6 bn       $8.4 bn $20.3 bn

Before we get all upset that these corporations earned all that money here in the US, and an article recently said that Apple has more cash than the US government' lets not forget that most of this profit was earned off the backs of foreign workers.  Companies like Apple and Cisco and Google produce their products in countries where workers have extremely limited rights if any rights at all; it's blood money. And, as I say above, just like when they move from northern states of the US to  "right to work" states in the US South where wages are lower and they blackmail communities in to giving them huge tax breaks and public subsidies, these corporations do the same to desperately poor countries in the former colonial world.

So it's not as if this cash belongs to US workers but Chinese, Bangladeshi and Vietnamese workers.

The point is that this money and cash like it is the product of the unpaid Labor of the working class the mainstay of the capitalist system no matter where we Labor. It's belongs to all of us collectively like all of society's wealth and its allocation should be determined collectively.  These corporations and those that run them are the real welfare recipients and wasters in society.  And we "bail" them out each and every day in one way or another.