Why New Obama, Romney Tax Plans Are Going Nowhere

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/24/why-new-obama-romney-tax-plans-are-going-nowhere.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29

President Obama and Mitt Romney both released tax plans Wednesday. Each enjoys approximately the same likelihood of being enacted in their entirety, which is absolutely none. (Rick Santorum’s tax plan, released last week, has, if anything, an even smaller chance of enactment.)

...... When, for instance, you read of a current top corporate tax rate of 35 percent potentially being lowered to 28 percent in the Obama plan, you need to know that barely a quarter of companies pay anything like the official rate. While the U.S. Treasury estimates the effective U.S. marginal tax rate at 29.2 percent for all corporations, according to the Congressional Budget Office report released this week, 2011’s actual corporate tax rate was just 12.1 percent, which is the lowest level recorded since the CBO began measuring this data 40 years ago. This is true despite the fact that corporate profits are at a record proportion of national income. So when corporate flacks complain that the U.S. cannot compete for global business owing to our high tax rate, it’s, well, a bit rich.

....Corporations do not pay lobbyists millions of dollars to forego their tax loopholes. They do not contribute even more to political campaign kitties and post-Citizens United super PAC funds for the purposes of seeing their profit margins reduced.

The actual point of releasing these plans is a bit like the way teenagers pick their wardrobes: to signal which clique they like to belong to.