Welcome to the ProRata podcast, a podcast that takes 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

Filling in for Dan Primack, I'm Kim Hart. On today's show, President Trump's plan to remove citizenship to babies born to non-citizens and what to expect when the president visits Pittsburgh later today.

But first, global tax proposals take aim at U.S. tech giants.

Governments around the world are seriously considering new taxes on the revenues of large

tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon that do significant business abroad.

The latest such proposal is from the United Kingdom, which plans to introduce a digital

services tax in 2020 that would force big American

tech firms to pay a 2% tax on British revenue. That follows a 3% revenue tax proposal from the

European Commission earlier this year. South Korea, India, Mexico, and Chile are also contemplating

similar policies. Let's break this down. There's a global consensus that the current international

tax regime is not well suited for today's digital economy. Today's laws tax the profits of

companies in the countries where they are headquartered. But the cross-border nature of the digital

economy has left many countries wanting a new tax solution that takes into account the location

of the company's users rather than the location of the company's

physical presence. Also, U.S. tech companies have perfected the art of moving profits to countries

with very low tax rates. That's why countries are proposing taxing revenue instead of profits.

It's much harder for a company to move revenue than it is to move profits, and taxing revenue

would put a bigger dent in the company's

balance sheets.

In 15 seconds, we'll go deeper on this with Jennifer McCloskey, who lobbies on behalf of the tech

industry here in Washington.

But first, this.

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