The corporation receives no tax deduction for dividends, so the corporation would first have to pay tax on it.

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That factory generates Canadian profits, on which the company gets to defer U.S. tax until those profits are repatriated to the United States. (It does have to pay corporate tax to Canada on a current basis.) But it gets to deduct the interest it pays on that bond issuance currently, against its American taxes instead of its Canadian taxes.

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Leaders of both parties have agreed to extend the payroll-tax break but have diverged on how to pay for it.

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Well, at one time, it was thought that you could work both sides of the coin and utilize the loophole: if you converted the company stock directly to the Roth, it seems that you would only have to pay tax on the basis of the stock (per NUA rules), and then never have to pay tax on the capital gains.

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So if, as so often happens, a creditor agrees to wipe your slate clean if you come up with most but not all of the money owed, you have to let the government know how much your debt was reduced by, and pay tax on it.

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The corporations rightly see it as unfair that they should have to pay any tax to the U.S. on an income stream that has already been taxed.

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If your tax bracket is likely to go up over the next decade (it is for many upper-income folks), and you have plenty of cash sitting around, it may make sense to convert an IRA into a Roth IRA. You pay tax on the account now, but all future earnings and withdrawals are tax free.

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