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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29357 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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That being said I mean... are there ways to legislate outside of tariffs to prevent this sort of major sell off of strategic business to adversarial nations?

Couple of tools. Golden shares is one way. Second is tax code. If you only allow some parts of the money spent outside the US to be tax deductible - suddenly US labor doesn't look so bad. The government has lots of tools. What is usually lacking is the will.

If you only allow some parts of the money spent outside the US to be tax deductible

Presumably the money spent offshore is spent by a foreign subsidiary.

This is in no way a barrier to a competently written tax code. How, exactly, does the money get to said foreign subsidiary? There is always going to be a point at which the financial resources leave the country and that's where enforcement can happen.

No, these firms have net foreign revenue that they want to repatriate to the US. In fact, that's the bigger thing they are taxed on.

Microsoft (just to pick an example, could be any of them) can fully fund their entire Indian and Vietnamese operations with a fraction of their overseas revenue. The money would have never entered the US in the first place.

If the money never leaves that other company, never returns to the US and then never gets paid to those executives then I don't think there's any issues with letting those other countries tax it. I don't think there are any issues with saying that money your company never actually lays hands on (a foreign subsidiary does instead) isn't subject to taxation. Of course, if you can't actually bring any money back from a foreign subsidiary there's not much point to having them....

But you can use it to hire some Koreans that can check code into a global repository instead of Americans.

The value of the code written by that subsidiary goes into the conglomerate at large.

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