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0 2 2 lower rates would help U. S -based mul tinationals compete against foreign- based multinationals—a good thing, since companies based in the U.S. ar e more likely to locate their high- end research, planning, and marketing jobs at hom e. Such a drop will also give corporations less incentive to base their global investment decisions on tax avoidance. In particular, opening up new operations in the U.S. would become more attractive. Reducing corporate taxes will help get the U. S. out of a game it cannot win. In a global economy, chasing profits across national borders is hope less. When a product is designed in one country, manufactured in another, and sold in a third, it's hard to figure out where the profits are really being made. What quid pro quo should Obama extract in exchange for lowering the corporate tax rate ? One possibility: getting solid business support for other initiatives such as health-care reform. Cutting corporate taxes may mean some lost revenue, but the long- term budget benefit of getting a grip on health-care costs is far more impor tant. Amore far-fetched trade-off would require companies to make their income tax returns public, at least in summary form. Companies now keep two different sets of books, one for in vestors and one for the tax authorities. Being able to see both sets would give us a better sense of what is going on in the global economy. The bottom line: At a time when jobs are disappearing by the millions, rais - ing taxes on U.S.-based multinationals is not the way to go. IBWI A SMALL CONTRIBUTION CORPORATE INC OM E TAX RECEIPTS AS A SHARE OF ALL FEDERAL RECEIPTS TEN- YEAR MOVING AVERAGE Data: Bureau of Economic Analysis REAL DISEASE, VIRTUAL HELP U.S. health officials are using digital tools to respond more quickly to swine flu and other potential epidemics By Arik Hesseldahl A day after news reports about an outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, health officials in Allegheny County, Pa., huddled to discuss contingency plans. How should they respond if the virus came to their part of the world? By closing schools? With widespread vaccinations ? To test different courses of action, they turned to computer sci entists who had built a working m odel of the county. "It helps come up with recommendations of when and how to intervene," says Dr. Ron Voorhees, chief of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Allegheny County Health Dept. This is the first time Voorhees has had such technological support. A team at the University of Pittsburgh had built a virtual world, similar to Second Life or SimCity, with the county's 1.3 mil lion residents represented by digital characters. It ran through 1 5 scenarios, with a variety of government reactions. Ultimately, the county avoided a seri ous outbreak, but Voorhees says it was well prepared. In recent years public-health officials have turned to computer scientists for aid in fighting a variety of infectious diseases. Techies help harness the growing amount of data people create each day, through Google searches, cell-phone calls, an d the like, so of ficials can detec t potential problem s faster than before. Google, for example, tracks the number of searches for "flu" and related term s and reports the results to the government. IBM do nated to researchers and governments, including Mexico, a progra m it created tha t can simulate the outbreak of a pandemic flu in more than 100 cities. At the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, an assistant professor of medicine, works on the effort w ith virtual worlds. His team plugs in real data—infections and deaths in different regions, say—and then crafts simula tions. It uses Census Bureau data to create a digital representative of each person in the U.S ., with details down to a person's age, location, and job. Le e works under the auspices of a National Institutes of Health project called Midas, short for Models of Infectious Disease Agent S tudy. The biggest decision for hea lth of ficials, says Lee, is when to close schools and offices because that causes "a sig nificant economic burden." In any case, when virtual workplaces and schools are closed, digital citizens don 't neces sarily stay home . S ome still go for walks or to the m all, where the y might catch or pass on a virus, just like in the real world. "No t even [virtual people] will all do what they 're told," says Lee. 1BW1 BUSINESSWEEK I M AY 18,2009
