By now everyone's heard of Apple's incredible network of tax shelters, which just in the last several years has saved them tens of billions of dollars in corporate taxes. Pretty much everyone except Rand Paul finds this reprehensible, but while Apple may be the best in the game when it comes to tax avoidance, they're far from the only player. Other big companies like Amazon and Microsoft do the same thing, keeping profits overseas so that they don't have to pay US taxes on them.

In many cases those companies would really like to bring that money back stateside, either to invest in their business here or (more commonly) to pay out dividends or buy back stock from investors. To do that, however, they'd have to pay 35% of those repatriated profits as tax. And no one wants to do that unless they have to.

Fortunately for these mega-corporations, they often don't have to. In 2004, under the Bush administration's leadership, Congress passed a law allowing a tax repatriation holiday, meaning that for a short period of time any profits brought back into the country would not be taxed. The purpose was to ensure that something productive would be done with that money--that it would be reinvested in US jobs and business needs. As the Treasury describes, however, this is not what happened:

In assessing the 2004 tax holiday, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reports that most of the largest beneficiaries of the holiday actually cut jobs in 2005-06 – despite overall economy-wide job growth in those years – and many used the repatriated funds simply to repurchase stock or pay dividends. Today, when U.S. corporations have ready access to cash they have accumulated and are holding here in the United States, it is even harder to make the case that a repatriation holiday will unlock new investment and job creation.

And perhaps even worse than all that, now that we have a history of allowing businesses to repatriate their earnings tax-free they have far more incentive to keep their money overseas as long as they can bear, waiting until the next time we forget ourselves and give them another opportunity to cheat the system--and the American public.