On Thursday, Brad Setser of the Council of Foreign Relations — esteemed by cognoscenti for his forensic analyses of balance of payments data — testified to a Senate committee about global tax avoidance by pharmaceutical companies. This issue may not have loomed large on many people’s radar screens, and with everything else going on you may wonder why you should care. But there are at least two reasons you should.

First, at a time when people are once again angsting about budget deficits — much of the angst is insincere, but still — it’s surely relevant that the U.S. government is losing a lot of revenue because multinational corporations are using accounting tricks to avoid paying taxes on profits earned here.

Second, now that it’s looking increasingly likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee, it seems relevant to note that his one major legislative success — the 2017 tax cut, which was supposed to bring corporate investment back to America — was, […]