Sloan’s Cash Cow

Columnists often have cash cows--storylines that they milk over and over. Allan Sloan writes the "Deals" column in the Washington Post, and his cash cow is outrage over corporate mergers and acquisitions that avoid taxes.

In dozens of columns, Sloan has complained about corporations that (legally) minimize their taxes when doing M&As. Typically, he implies that we would be better off if every M&A on Wall Street got hit with a hefty tax of 30 percent or so. In today's column, Sloan complains that a proposed transfer of the Atlanta Braves from Time Warner to Liberty Media would avoid $700 million in taxes, and that average taxpayers would be "shut out."

Here are some issues that I've never seen Sloan address:

1) Does it make sense to tax M&As at all? Why should Uncle Sam get a pound of flesh every time American businesses do some restructuring? M&As often have capital-gains-tax implications. But capital gains taxes can represent a double-taxation on business earnings. Under a more efficient tax system, capital gains would not be taxed at all.

2) Two items that make the tax effects of M&As complex are capital gains and depreciation. These items are unique to income taxes. Under a consumption-based tax system, such as the Steve Forbes Flat Tax, they would be eliminated and M&As vastly simplified. Why not focus on tax reform as a systematic fix to the problems of M&As, rather than complaining about each individual deal?

3) Better yet, why not eliminate the corporate income tax altogether, as many eminent conservative and liberal economists have advocated over the decades? Corporate taxes are ultimately paid for by workers, consumers, and individual shareholders. The former group probably bears most of the burden in the modern globalized economy. If $700 million of taxes were avoided on the Atlanta Braves' deal, the biggest winners are likely to be American workers.

Whining about the particular effects of our complex tax code is easy. I'd rather see columnists like Sloan tell us how to simplify the code so that corporations aren't encouraged to pursue the fancy tax sheltering that he chronicles in the first place.