The Treasury secretary, Jacob Lew, has sent the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dave Camp, a letter calling on Congress to act to outlaw "inversions" under which American companies merge with overseas companies to avoid American taxes:
Congress should enact legislation immediately — and make it retroactive to May 2014 — to shut down this abuse of our tax system.
What we need as a nation is a new sense of economic patriotism, where we all rise or fall together...We should not be providing support for corporations that seek to shift their profits overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
At Bloomberg View, Leonid Bershidsky replies that Congress and Mr. Lew should forget about banning inversions and instead act urgently to lower the U.S. corporate tax rate. That makes sense to me than some sort of misguided definition of patriotism that involves retroactively changing the law to make sure someone else (not Mr. Lew) pays more taxes.
