Oil companies love to say that their ownership is the average American retiree, and utilities can often claim the same. Look at your retirement account or, should you be so lucky as to have one, your company’s pension plan. Odds are that it is heavily invested in the US energy sector. Shifts in the parameters… Keep reading →
For most people the issue of corporate taxation is both intriguing and offputting in equal measure. The complex and often contradictory nature of the enormous US tax code allows for a combination of passion and boredom that extends to almost no other region of policy.
That is part of what has made attacking the US tax code in an effort to simplify it or make it reflect policy goals so challenging; companies with tax lawyers on call can take advantage of seemingly innocuous or even beneficial tax policy, only to be accused later of corruptly using ‘loopholes’ or ‘subsidies’ to run their businesses. At the same time, financiers and corporations build otherwise unsustainable business models around the tax code rather than at the intersection of supply and demand, in turn warping the very markets they intend to serve. Keep reading →
