The decline in the benefit of a lower corporate tax rate accelerates as you go lower. For example, going from 35% to 25% might reduce your corporate inversions by 75%. Going from 35% to 10% might reduce your inversions by 85%.

The challenge is to find the level where you gain the most as a nation overall. If you have something to offer other than just the low tax rate, it will never make sense to chase toward zero. The closer you get to that ideal level, the more other factors come into play to your nation's benefit in regards to keeping companies. The US has vast benefits for a company like Pfizer that would compensate for N% additional tax rate.

If a VC is looking at two very similar businesses selling internationally, with one seated in the US where their profits will be doubly taxed, and the other running in a different country where profits are not subject to this, then ceteris paribus, they should expect investment in the non-US company to be more profitable.

i.e. unicorns and rainbows. You're essentially just responding to every response to your posts with "yeah but more assumptions make it true!"

I don't see myself relying on strong assumptions. I am laying out some simplified models to explain the core mechanisms of what's going on.

Corporations aren't repatriating the money they hold offshore. I can see why the US wants a piece of that pie, but they currently aren't getting any pie and are losing piemakers. Taking a smaller cut of something whilst also having that something flow back into the US is surely a good thing.

Indirectly, they are: "Nearly Half of So-Called “Offshore” Funds Already in the United States"

Earlier this year, a survey was sent to 27 U.S. multinational corporations and found they held more than half a trillion dollars in tax-deferred foreign earnings at the end of FY2010. The survey also found that 46% of those foreign earnings – almost $250 billion – was maintained in U.S. bank accounts or invested in U.S. assets such as U.S. Treasuries, U.S. stocks other than their own, U.S. bonds, or U.S. mutual funds.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/me...

All nations would have to go to zero in the category of what other benefits they have to offer (their sum value proposition outside of their tax rate). That's not going to happen. Those benefits add up to being worth a certain amount of tax depending on the nation and the corporation's specific context. If this wasn't true, every relevant corporation would have flooded out of the US (or Germany) long ago, seeking much lower rates.

Also, it only takes one Ireland to drive the entire world toward 0%.