"We have met the enemy and he is us. Yesterday, in a series of hits as operatic and brutal as the last 15 minutes of the Godfather, the government effectively made inversion through corporate merger an offense punishable by corporate death.
Using the threat of an unlimited Treasury investigation, the President and Senator Dick Durbin stopped Walgreen (WAG) from moving to Switzerland. The wreckage of some $10 billion in lost stock value for mostly Main Street investors was left as a grim reminder not to cross the government by, in this case, following the letter of our own stupid laws.
Related: Walgreen stays at home
As a refresher, inversion is what it's called when a U.S. corporation buys a foreign outfit and in effect moves their headquarters to that country, which inevitably has a lower tax rate. It's not a classy move but it's legal because that's the way Congress wrote the tax codes. "...
Walgreens should have gone ahead and moved, dared Durbin and Obama to make good on their threats, and then sued in federal court if they actually tried to make good on those threats.
