Every day, it’s possible to shake your head and wonder: where do they find these people? These people who run for office and are truly clueless about reality and, especially, economic facts. You can throw a rock anywhere in Washington, D.C. and you are almost guaranteed to his a member of Congress walking around in a “I must do everything to help corporations” trance. Like John Delaney.

Truthfully, I had never heard of this guy — and I have a sickness for remembering lots of the names of members of Congress, even relatively obscure ones. This guy represents a district in Maryland.

And he’s got a wacky idea: give corporations “only” a “limited” ability to repatriate profits sitting in offshore accounts, a “tax holiday” as the spinmeisters for corporations like to call it. I’ve written a lot about the whole scam of the corporate tax and it’s just that: a scam.

So, Citizens for Tax Justice gives this obscure guy’s idea the right title “Delaney’s Delusion” and destroys the whole proposal, piece by piece:

This type of tax amnesty for repatriated offshore profits is euphemistically called a “repatriation holiday” by its supporters. The Congressional Research Service has found that a similar proposal enacted in 2004 provided no benefit for the economy and that many of the corporations that participated actually reduced employment.

And:

But in many other situations, an American corporation generates profits in the U.S. but uses accounting gimmicks to tell the IRS that they are generated by a subsidiary in a country with no corporate tax or a very low corporate tax (an offshore tax haven). Often this subsidiary company carries out no actual business and consists of little more than a post office box.

And:

Perhaps the worst aspect of Rep. Delaney’s proposal is that it signals an obvious misunderstanding of, or indifference to, the fundamental problems with our corporate tax system, which is in desperate need of reform and which would become more dysfunctional under this proposal.

The main reason U.S. corporations have so much in “permanently reinvested earnings” offshore is the rule allowing American corporations to “defer” paying their U.S. taxes on those profits until they are repatriated. Deferral essentially provides a benefit for holding profits offshore, or at least convincing the IRS that they are offshore.

There is a broader debate taking place right now about how the tax system could be reformed to address this problem and several others. The most logical solution would be to repeal “deferral” so that U.S. corporations pay U.S. taxes on all their profits when they are earned (minus any corporate income taxes paid on these profits to foreign governments).

It’s really a symbol of the low quality of representation that this garbage gets floated.