Lanhee J Chen, Columnist

By Lew's Logic, All Tax Breaks Are Unpatriotic

Do Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and the rest of the Obama administration, by attacking corporate "inversions," doubt the patriotism of all recipients of corporate tax breaks?

July 28, 2014 at 7:50 PM UTC

By Lanhee J Chen

Lanhee Chen is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who also teaches public policy at Stanford University. He was the policy director of Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. Chen was a senior official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the George W. Bush administration. He practiced business litigation with the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and served as the Winnie Neubauer visiting fellow in health policy studies at the Heritage Foundation. Chen earned his doctorate and master's degree in political science from Harvard University, his law degree from Harvard Law School and his bachelor's degree in government from Harvard College.

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Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is continuing the Barack Obama administration's war on corporate "inversions" by writing in today's Washington Post that such activity is akin to economic treason. The practice of inversion, whereby U.S.-based companies merge with foreign ones and then declare that they are based abroad, is denounced as an unpatriotic way for corporations to minimize tax obligations.

Make no mistake: The administration's manufactured outrage isn't about good policy or fairness. It's raw politics, as the White House and its Democratic allies in Congress desperately search for any campaign issue, from the minimum wage to student-loan financing, to help them retain control of the Senate in the midterm elections.