It is almost 30 years since President Ronald Reagan signed a major US tax reform bill into law and since the late 1990s in particular, the corporate tax system has been massively abused by large American multinational firms. From early 2009, President Barack Obama has made a number of proposals to reform the corporate code but they neither got traction in the Congress or serious engagement from the president. Now in the last year of his administration, one of his Treasury secretaries has threatened to use a never-used 82-year-old law that would impose retaliatory double taxes on European Union companies and individuals.