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Who would ultimately pay that $210 billion? U.S. consumers.

This toxic plan, almost everyone agrees, will instead cost the United States in lost jobs and taxes. Companies faced with the new taxes will simply relocate right out of the U.S. tax net. They won't go to Switzerland. Obama has already declared the Swiss to be the mortal enemy.

We're supposedly in the post-ironic age. Yet, prior to the news that Obama seeks to destroy the economies of allies around the world, we had no idea what irony was.

How ironic is it that:

-- America's first black president would be the one to pronounce a death sentence on one of the most successful black nations on earth?

-- A U.S. administration would abandon due process by "assuming" that noncooperating financial institutions are cheating?

-- George W. Bush destroyed two countries in eight years, but, Obama plans to destroy a dozen after only three months in office?

-- A U.S. president is proposing to make his country an undesirable location for the headquarters of multinational companies?

-- Obama himself cheated when claiming that U.S. companies paid only $16 billion of tax on $700 billion of foreign active earnings in 2004, omitting to mention the $120 billion they also paid in foreign taxes that year?

-- He endlessly referred to a building in Cayman that houses 18,000 companies, but overlooked a building in Delaware that is home to 200,000 companies?

-- Having spoken against protectionism a couple of months earlier, Obama proposed tax legislation declaring economic war on some of the United States' closest allies?

-- The United States began to emerge from recession before the first dollar of Obama's print-and-spend economic suicide pact hit the ground?

-- In announcing his plans to blow the Caribbean back to the Stone Age, Obama would say he was doing it in the name of "a fairer U.S. tax code"?

Ahahahahaha. Sorry. Couldn't help it. That ironic laugh erupted because the ridiculous U.S. tax code is the cause of the problems Obama professed to be "solving."

If the onslaught succeeds, generations of Caribbean children would be forced to live in squalor, Haiti-style. The only beneficiaries would be the highly paid tax lawyers and accountants.

Lord knows in which country the insurance companies will end up. The U.S. insurers have been whining the loudest and longest about their inability to compete, and in time, it is possible that U.S. citizens will hold them responsible for the flight of capital away from the United States. Oh dear. Imagine that: unpopular insurance companies.

A black president who kills black economies. An admitted tax cheat in charge of the Treasury, characterizing legal activities as "tax cheating." A tax code so unfair that Darth Vader wouldn't have dared enforce it on the Empire. Ahahahahaha. Sigh.

ROGER CROMBIE is a Bermuda-based columnist for Risk & Insurance®.

July 1, 2009

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