When he was running for president, Barack Obama promised no new taxes on the middle class.
That promise lasted all of two months as the Obamacare Bill imposed 23 new taxes on Americans. The evilest of them all was the medical device tax.
Most taxes are based on your net profits but not so the medical device tax.
You could lose a billion dollars and you would still owe the tax because it was a tax on the devices and not based on profits.
That tax drove many companies either out of business or out of the country. That tax no longer exists as President Trump did away with it.
But, by then it was too late to save the industry in this country.
Companies with small profit margins or companies that invested money developing a product were often taxed into the red, driving them out of business. Some merely moved out of the country.
From The National Review
Americans for Tax Reform has discovered 20 new or higher taxes embedded in Obamacare, totaling at least $500 billion. Among them, the $20 billion medical-device tax is the most baffling, unfair, and potentially deadly. While almost every business tax ever conceived targets profits or gains, Obama’s brilliant “change” to this tradition is to tax the gross revenues of medical-device makers, whether or not they generate profits. Thus, companies that create new, life-saving inventions can lose money as their products struggle to succeed and then suffer the unnecessary blow of a 2.3 percent tax on their losses.
As my old college friend Quin Hillyer explains in a compelling and disturbing opinion piece in the November 2 USA Today, what looks like a tiny levy actually translates into serious bucks for many companies that yield slim returns, even in good times.
“For smaller device manufacturers with narrow profit margins,” Hillyer writes, “the tax could actually exceed their profits, pushing them into the red.”
David Adams