Are Illinois’ largest companies just a bunch of tax cheats?

No, of course not.  Next question.

The issue is this: 

The United States stands alone in the civilized world in taxing profits of its corporations not just in the United States, but wherever in the world they are earned — but if those profits are reinvested locally, the tax is not applied unless and until the money is “repatriated,” brought back to the United States for use by the parent company or distribution as dividends or profit-sharing. 

Sounds reasonable to me.  But Durbin, in announcing legislation on Friday that would require any U.S. corporation undertaking an “inversion” to reincorporate abroad to pay taxes on any overseas profit, regardless of whether it was repatriated, announced a list of companies holding large sums of profit abroad, and the Tribune lists major local companies on the list and sought out representatives for comment.

• Abbott Labs:  $24 billion.
• AbbVie:  $21 billion.
• Caterpillar:  $17 billion.
• McDonald’s:  $16 billion.
• Mondelez:  $12.4 billion.
• Baxter International:  $12.2 billion.
• Deere:  $4.3 billion.

Caterpillar representatives

confirmed the amount was correct but said a significant portion represented assets such as land, buildings, equipment and inventory. “The total amount should not be misconstrued as a cash equivalent,” Caterpillar said.

And Baxter

reiterated that if companies are to invest in the U.S. and to remain competitive “we encourage Congress to fundamentally reform the U.S. corporate tax code.”

 So, given that, so far as I can tell, I generally end up preaching to the choir, I suspect that my readers will generally agree that we need tax reform to fix this perverse situation in which companies are better off continuing to invest overseas than to use those profits for the benefit of their American operations.  But it’s still a sorry state of affairs that, not only does our senior senator, who will win re-election handily (the GOP candidate is an independently-wealthy fool with no competition in the primary because the local GOP is pathetic and the national organization wasn’t interested in coming to our aid), nonetheless chooses to demagogue this issue rather than offering constructive solutions, and that the Tribune “reporting” does nothing more than provide him a platform.