There is a fight brewing over taxes. This has nothing to do with the tax season (don’t forget the filing deadline is April 15th!) and everything to do with Barack Obama’s campaign promise to stop tax breaks for companies that ship U.S. jobs overseas. President Obama is trying to make good on the Candidate Obama’s promise to change the current tax provision called “deferral” that allows multinationals to avoid U.S. taxes on much of their overseas earnings, as long as the money remains invested offshore. The Wall Street Journal says, as much as $800 billion in U.S. companies' earnings is currently held offshore. This translates into about $61 billion in forgone tax revenue for the U.S. government over the next five years, according to Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. Business groups argue that this will make U.S. companies less competitive since many foreign governments don't tax their companies' overseas earnings. However, it is hard to defend the stance that we should forgo a legitimate source of revenue for our government operations and not tax corporate overseas profits, while we are running deficits in the trillions of dollars, desperately trying to keep the domestic economy afloat. The debate continues whether or not the U.S. economy has seen the worst of this recession. Last week's stock market gains and the recent housing market data may have given people hope, but some economists say that the bad unemployment numbers will be followed by “months more” of bad economic news. Beijing is evaluating different reform proposals to ensure that China’s vast population has access to at least basic affordable healthcare by 2020. China’s social safety net is very weak (and one thought the whole purpose of living under a Communist system was to get the basic needs of the people covered). Spending on healthcare, education, and saving up for the old-age are the main reasons the Chinese are not consuming at the rate necessary to keep their economy growing at the time when China can not rely on the overseas consumers to buy the goods Chinese factories churn out.