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Living in the nation’s capital, it is easy to be caught up on the wonkiest aspects of the tax reform debate. Terms like “transfer pricing” and “tax deferral,” which would generate understandable looks of confusion from most people, are parts of the everyday lexicon for those of us making the case for tax reform. That said, even in a sea of policy complexity, the case for policy solutions can be quite [...]
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Sparky Anderson, who managed World Series-winning teams in Cincinnati and Detroit, once remarked, “We’re getting close to opening day. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.” January 3rd, 2013 marked American policymaking’s opening day: the start of the 113th Congress. We in the tech industry see the start of a new season of policymaking as a good thing because ours is an industry rooted [...]
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In what was certainly a tortured process, the Congress and the White House have completed work on legislation to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” and what economists predicted could have been a relapse into a national, if not global, recession. Importantly, this bill goes beyond recession avoidance and takes an important step toward stronger economic growth and job creation by renewing three key [...]
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The San Francisco Chronicle recently editorialized against replacing America’s antiquated tax system with a modern, competitive, market-based approach. The shift would place a premium on job creation and encourage companies to invest more of their foreign earnings here at home. In Wednesday’s edition, I respond to the editorial, underscoring the importance of this new approach not only to U.S. businesses [...]
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The 2012 version of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) is history, and the next phase has begun, i.e., trying to figure out what it all means! Many theories abound within the Twitter-verse, blogs and various email strings. At a minimum, WCIT served as a lens that brought into greater focus the risks and opportunities that lay before us. With only 89 countries thus far [...]
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As I watched a bit of football the other day, it made me wish that we had a yellow flag for policy setting in this country. If that were possible, I would throw the flag at our policymakers for failing to fix an out-of-date, broken tax system and at our national media for their off-base characterizations of those simply trying to work within the system. Our tax code is atrocious. It is antiquated, [...]
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Today, the President signed into law a bill establishing Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with Russia, bringing to closure years of work spent opening the growing Russian market to American goods and services. The new law represents a victory for American workers and businesses, and will deliver a welcome boost to the U.S. economy at a time when it needs it most. The enactment of PNTR legislation [...]
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Today, at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), a majority of national delegations adopted revisions to the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) that could lead to significant challenges to a free and open Internet, as well to how global information and communications technology (ICT) companies offer Internet-based services. The United States joined with other [...]
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At ITI, we are always happy when our policy ideas are supported. That’s why we were pleased to see a recent article in the Economist that echoed many of our key suggestions for improving the U.S. economy. The piece is by two leaders of Harvard Business School’s United States Competitiveness Project and contains policy recommendations to get the economy on the right track in 2013. The article mirrors [...]
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When the much ballyhooed Super Committee failed to reach an agreement to address the national debt last year, committee members put in place an automatic spending cut mechanism so draconian and unpalatable it was thought that Congress was certain to act before it went into effect. The mechanism, in short, slashes nearly all of the federal government’s annual discretionary budgets by 8.4 percent. [...]
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