Believing Opposites

I never cease to be amazed that people can clearly believe utterly contradictory things. This editorial was written to support new taxes on multinational corporations. It lays out the following:

1) American multinational corporations are burying profits outside the U.S. to avoid taxes
2) Given the option to pay fewer taxes on the earnings, they have "repatriated" them during occasional "tax holidays" in which they could avoid up to 85% of the taxes they'd otherwise pay on it.
3) Therefore, we need to avoid tax holidays and place new taxes on these corporations.

If the goal is to increase tax revenues, or to "make them pay wha they owe," #3 seems rather backward to me. It might sound nice on paper... but we have evidence of corporate behavior that should prove it won't achieve the intended result.

If corporations are moving profits offshore to avoid the present level of taxes, our tax revenue on those is 0%. If we have lower taxes, they choose to pay some of the tax - evidently, they get some benefit from having the profits in the US. The tax revenue we collect is now >0%.

If higher taxes cause more profit-hiding, and thus prevent us from collecting revenue we'd otherwise collect... what will happen with even-higher taxes? 50% of $0 is exactly the same as 35% of $0... except that higher taxes will likely lead them to hide away even more profit, potentially lowering tax revenue (the result is uncertain - will the higher rate or the lower profits left exposed to the tax be dominant?)