Fortune magazine has dropped Medtronic and Mylan from its prestigious Fortune 500 list for domiciling overseas to avoid taxes, and Washington Post Allan Sloan approves — of the magazine's move that is.
"To its credit, Fortune kicked Medtronic and Mylan off for deserting our country,"
he writes.
Fortune's list editor Scott DeCarlo told Sloan, "The Fortune 500 is going to remain a list of companies based in the U.S. We want to maintain the integrity of the list."
But while the corporate tax inversions like Medtronic and Mylan's have abated, "corporate desertions continue, sometimes in mutated forms," Sloan writes.
"For example, two of the three companies whose desertions had been upended by the Treasury’s new regulations were acquired by previous deserters: Salix Pharmaceuticals by Valeant Pharmaceuticals, and Auxilium Pharmaceuticals by Endo International."
So what's the upshot of all this? "Absent a miracle in Washington, the bleeding of corporate tax revenues out of our country will continue," Sloan explains.
Elsewhere on the tax front, as several GOP presidential candidates embrace the idea of the flat tax, the man who made the idea popular, Steve Forbes, lauds states for cutting taxes.
"A variety of tax experiments are currently under way that bode well for radical federal tax reform after the 2016 elections," the Forbes Media editor-in-chief
writes on Forbes.com.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, R, pushed through tax cuts two years ago that now "are starting to yield a bumper crop in prosperity," Forbes says.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, R, "is also hacking away at his state’s personal income tax, with an eye to eliminating it altogether, relying instead on broad-based consumption taxes," he writes. "Even blue states are getting the tax message." Forbes cites Maine as an example.
"Over time states with no income taxes perform better than those with the heaviest burdens: better in economic growth, population growth, job growth, personal income growth and — liberals, please note — government revenue growth," he argues.
"What the states are demonstrating is that simplification and major income tax rate reductions generate prosperity."
© 2026 Newsmax Finance. All rights reserved.