In Ireland, India, China, and elsewhere:

June 3 (Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

Why, the greedy, ungrateful, unpatriotic BASTARD, unwilling to pay his fair share to help destroy the Evil Empire (America That Was) in order to help build the Worker’s Paradise! Somebody ought to publish his home address so ACORN can organize a few drive-by’s.

U.S. tax rules let companies defer paying corporate rates as high as 35 percent on most types of foreign profits as long as that money remains invested overseas. Obama says he wants to end such incentives to keep foreign profits tax-deferred so that companies would invest them in the U.S.

And naturally, making US rates less confiscatory would never occur to him, any more than it would to any other totalitarian dictator.

Barry Bosworth, an economist in Washington at the Brookings Institution research center, said many software companies such as Microsoft have exploited tax and trade rules in the U.S. and other countries to achieve a low overall tax rate.

Actually, they’ve tried to maximize their profits by shielding themselves as best they can from a greedy, overly powerful federal government here, and shopping around for a saner tax rate elsewhere — which is exactly what they’re supposed to do, if they’re going to fulfill their ethical obligation to their shareholders. But that competition is a basic tenet of free market capitalism and, as such, would be completely incomprehensible to Hussein’s ruling junta, who have little or no understanding of such abstruse trivia — and even less interest in it.

Ballmer said that, while the Obama proposals would preserve expense deductions related to research and experimentation costs, the overall deduction limits for companies that defer tax on foreign profits would raise the cost of employing U.S. workers. Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders would require Microsoft to cut costs, he said, meaning many jobs would be moved out of the country.

Ballmer estimated that higher taxes under the proposal would reduce profits for companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average by between 10 and 15 percentage points.

“It’s just a question of how much will the Dow come down,” Ballmer said. “It’s not about companies anyway; we’re talking about shareholders.”

Not for long, we aren’t. Obama intends to change all that, with corporations defined as Enemies of the State, and government being the only shareholder that matters.

Hey, wonder if, after Obama seizes control of Microsuck, he’ll find some way to give a percentage of the rotting federally-owned corpse to the UAW?

Thompson of Symantec, the Cupertino, California-based maker of Norton anti-virus software and similar tools, said software companies are frustrated by being called tax cheats and compared with companies that moved their headquarters to low-tax countries such as Bermuda.

Thompson called the Obama proposals “counterintuitive” to the administration’s other stated goals of fostering an innovation-oriented economy.

“It is a little bit ironic that most of our most significant trading partners and partners globally have taken the tack that they’ll reduce corporate tax rates to stimulate economic growth and not raise corporate tax rates,” Thompson said.

That’s Iron Law of Socialism #1: it doesn’t work, never has worked, and never will work. Iron Law of Socialism #2: you’re gonna get it whether you like it or not. Iron Law of Socialism #3 is that it’s almost impossible to get rid of once it’s implemented. Some of us will soon be shocked — SHOCKED — to see these laws demonstrated.

Again, I mean.

Oh, and, via Ed: guess who supported the Obama campaign, and donated a big chunk to his Coronation jamboree? Go on; guess.

Iron Law of Socialism #4: bought socialist politicians only stay bought until their agenda comes in conflict with the buyer’s. Q for Ballmer and Gates: how do you like your precious Marxist Messiah now?

Update! The Obama Economic Miracle continues: YET MORE JOBS CREATED OR SAVED! Thank you, God-Emperor Hussein!

Updated update! Just gotta throw in this bit from Captain Ed’s post, referring to the now-famous Innocent Bystanders graph showing the abject failure of the stimulus package in achieving its supposed purpose:

Not only has unemployment not followed the predicted dark blue line after passing the Obama/Pelosi Porkulus package, we have actually exceeded the boogeyman light blue line for unemployment. We are heading towards double-digit unemployment and doing that while we incur the massive debt of the unstimulating stimulus package. We could just as easily have kept the money and ridden out the unemployment, much as we’re forced to do now, only being a lot poorer while doing it.

Why is this important? It demonstrates that the President and his economic advisers have gotten pretty much everything about this economic collapse wrong. Instead of contracting government spending and shoring up the credibility of the currency, they’re setting records in dissipating it instead. Instead of focusing on fixing the problem that government explicitly created — mortgage-backed securities — they’ve literally left that for last while they waste money chasing every Democratic constituency but ignoring the actual cancer in the financial system.

Yeah, well, the real problem here is that Democrats ARE the cancer in the system.