Echidne: Poor Big Pharma!

The pharmaceutical industry has had such a hard time, what with the Vioxx scandal and such. So it comes as a relief to learn that the government is helping these suffering firms out by giving them a tiny tax cut. It goes like this:

A new tax break for corporations is allowing the biggest American drugmakers to return as much as $75 billion in profits from international havens to the United States while paying a fraction of the normal tax rate.

The break is part of the American Jobs Creation Act, signed into law by President Bush in October, which allows companies a one-year window to return foreign profits to the United States at a 5.25 percent tax rate, compare