Manny Thorsday: Would a Temporary "Corporate Tax Holiday" on Overseas Profits Really Boost the U.S. Economy?

Morning all! With all of the recent wrangling over our current corporate tax rate being "too high", this article by Chuck Marr at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities caught my eye over the weekend. Apparently the corporate lobbyists whores, I mean, hordes, are back at it again pushing for a temporary tax holiday for overeas corporate profits as a way to supposedly "stimulate the U.S. economy" and "create jobs" (in the U.S. I would presume?) despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Marr calls it a "battle of influence vs. evidence". Sadly, it seems we get a lot of that in this country this days with influence almost always coming out on top in blowout after blowout of epic proportions.

In the post, Marr takes a look at the last time such a tax holiday was passed, in 2004, and how that worked out for the U.S. economy and job creation fronts:

A similar tax holiday enacted in 2004 proved to be a complete policy failure. Its backers claimed that firms would use the repatriated earnings to invest in U.S. jobs and economic growth. Instead, they mostly used the money for purposes that the tax-holiday legislation had sought to prohibit, such as repurchasing their own stock and paying bigger dividends to their shareholders. Moreover, many firms actually laid off large numbers of U.S. workers even as they reaped multi-billion-dollar benefits from the tax holiday and passed them on to shareholders. To cite just two examples, Pfizer — which repatriated around $37 billion in foreign profits, the most of any firm — eliminated around 10,000 American jobs in 2005, while Merck repatriated $15.9 billion and announced layoffs of 7,000 workers in 2005. (These layoffs cannot be attributed to general economic weakness: they came at a time when the U.S. economy was growing significantly and adding jobs.)

I highly advise everyone to go read this post in its entirety and draw your own conclusions. However if it's quite obvious that these temporary tax "holidays" serve to do the exact opposite of boosting the economy and creating more jobs, how can proponents of it keep trotting out the same tired old, and wrong, arguments in favor of them with virtally nobody in power pushing back and calling them out for such blatant dishonesty? Or do silly, stubborn little things called "facts" no longer matter if one has enough money, power, and influence? Or have they ever mattered?