When it comes to taxes, neither party has an exclusive claim to dumbness. Bi-partisanship on taxes is pretty common–and over the years it’s one of the central reasons we have such a deep hole in the public till. And it just keep coming.

The dumb fest this time joins together Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Rand Paul. I’ve written before on the really bad idea of a tax repatriation “holiday”. It goes something like this: “we (meaning, big corporations) made a whole bunch of money overseas and we’ve parked it over there because we didn’t want to pay our fair share of taxes. But, out of the goodness of our hearts, if you give us a tax break, then, we will bring the money back to help all our poor citizens”. Instead of paying the 35 percent corporate tax rate, these corporate evaders want to pay 5.25 percent–which is almost free money.

So, this time, the bad idea has a new twist: Reid and Paul suggest fixing the hole in the infrastructure fund by using money from a tax repatriation holiday.

Dumb–as Citizens for Tax Justice explains:

The first problem with such a proposal is many of these offshore profits are clearly earned in the United States and then manipulated through accounting gimmicks so corporations appear to earn the money in countries where it won’t be taxed, as demonstrated by several recent CTJ reports. In fact, profits corporations report earning in zero-tax countries would receive the biggest breaks under a repatriation holiday because the U.S. tax normally due on repatriated profits is reduced by whatever taxes have been paid to foreign governments.

The second problem with a repatriation holiday is that Congress enacted this type of proposal in 2004, and critics have widely panned that measure as providing no increase in employment or investment but only enriching shareholders and executives.

The third problem is that it loses revenue. The non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) has estimated that a repeat of the 2004 measure would reduce revenue by (and increase the budget deficit by) $96 billion over a decade.

According to JCT, one reason for the massive revenue loss is that some of the offshore profits would be repatriated anyway absent any new tax break, and companies would pay the full tax. Another reason is that the measure would encourage corporations to engage in even more accounting games to make their U.S. profits appear to be earned in offshore tax havens, with the expectation that a little lobbying could prod Congress to enact another repatriation holiday in a few years.

Did I say this yet? Dumb.