If I were Halliburton's chairman, I would reference Ms. Clinton's remarks and say that his duty to his shareholders is best served by removing their property from Ms. Clinton's hubristic grasp.

chsw

Why would anyone other than a refiner locate in the United States and soon they will all be outdated and located outside the country. What did people think would happen when they bowed and scraped to the enviro whacko's? There will be no new energy sources allowed in this country? Still hoping for $5 a gallon gas to see if there is anyone left in the country with the balls to take the dhimmi's that brought it on to task.

The dhimmi comedy continues.

Does this mean the Bill will have to travel all the time to collect his millions from Haliburton? He must be on they're payroll, he's on all the Arab country and terrorists organizations payroll. Dubia rings a bell, something about Bill trying to push the port deal through for them.

I don't know if it's quite fair to say the Democrats' base consists of "economic illiterates and [the] mathematically challenged."

Their base largely consists of 75-90+ year-old folks who might at one point have been economically literate and mathematically unchallenged, but they've reflexively been voting Democrat their whole lives and just don't know any better.

Anyways, the elimination of taxation on foreign profits would have been a sweet reform and then the Halliburtons of the country would have had little to no cause to re-locate; alas, the GOP only managed to reduce those tax rates (ablet substantial reductions) during their fleeting time in power. There were further reforms along those lines on the agenda, but, of course, the various wing nuts committed political suicide last November, and that's the end of that. *sigh*

*albeit* substantial reductions....

Bush and the GOP Congress put through substantial cuts on individual taxes, and a Clinton-era change allowed smaller corporations which distribute earnings to shareholders to elect to be treated as "closely held" corporations (a/k/a "subchapter S corporations") where the income is taxed as distributed, but the federal corporate tax rate for most corporations remains at 35%, second highest among industrialized economies.

Furthermore, as noted in the post, we are the ONLY one of the OECD nations to tax companies' overseas earnings.

Eliminating this double taxation would indeed give most of the companies who move their HQs offshore an incentive to stay based here, but more importantly it would make our companies more competitive in foreign markets.

Halliburton might still have left, or at least shifted much of its operations to the Gulf, to counter SLB's presence there. But they have been competing with a company paying substantially less of their profits in taxes; had their rate been competitive, their pricing could have been more so as well.

"I think it's disgraceful that American companies are more than happy to try to get no-bid contracts like Halliburton has, and then turn around and say, 'You know, we're not going to stay.'"

Yeah, if you're going to shovel government (aka taxpayer) money at a company (like Goldman Sachs) they should at least have the decency to hang around and stuff your campaign contribution box with money!