International companies like Apple are required by the United States to pay domestic taxes on foreign income, but only if those earnings are brought back into the U.S. Because of this, Apple has amassed over $200 billion in foreign earnings that it has held as being "reinvested overseas."
Trump's idea to tax foreign earnings at 10 percent was falsely portrayed by a poorly written Financial Times article by Daniel Thomas and Vanessa Houlder to sound like a tax holiday. Instead, Trump's proposal would levy a tax on overseas earnings whether they were imported or not.
Such a plan would create chaos for companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others that are already being targeted by the European Commission, looking for ways to grab corporate cash at the expense of those companies' investors and employees.
This would be particularly difficult if a Trump administration were also seeking to set up protectionist economic walls at the same time, potentially triggering a global recession related to economic uncertainty.
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