Tax and send

Yes, "send"!

President Obama today announced plans to increase taxes on businesses doing business overseas. One plan is to remove or possibly reduce the credit for foreign taxes paid to other countries. So for example if a US company pays five million dollars in taxes to country X, their US tax bill is reduced by five million dollars. The same rule applies to US citizens paying tax in other countries and most states apply that same rule to income taxes paid to other states.

The problem is that the US already has some of the highest corporate taxes in the whole developed world. This will only increase the burden on US companies. At some point that will make it unprofitable for the company to be headquartered ("domiciled" is the correct term) in the US. When that happens, companies will move their jobs to other countries, increasing US unemployment. Is that the Administration's intent? If not, how do they plan to discourage that?

This whole idea is really unfair to America's workers. It will encourage moving jobs overseas. Is this the "Change we can believe in"?

What does the 10th Amendment mean?

The tenth Amendment to the US Constitution says:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

What does that mean? I always thought it was pretty simple: it means that the United States (the "federal government") can only do what the Constitution says it can do, and that the states or the people can do everything else, unless the Constitution says the states can't. In other words, the Constitution is a document that limits what the federal government can do.

To me that means that since there is no provision for it to take over private companies, give money to failing banks, or control the country's schools, it cannot do it. For some reason this pretty simple sentence has been ignored by politicians for a very long time. Why?