Memo To Fox News & The GOP: America Has The Second-Lowest Business Taxes In The World

[Ichingcarpenter]

This concept of effective tax rates (ie. the tax rate actually paid and enforced) is key to understanding the most telling part of this Fox News discussion - the part at the end where former Bush-Cheney spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck parrots McCain campaign talking points about America supposedly having a very high corporate tax rate in relation to the rest of the world. This, says Dyck and fellow Republicans, is driving businesses to move offshore.

It sounds like a credible storyline, especially considering that officially, our corporate tax rate is somewhere between 35 and 39 percent. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

To know how high - or low - the effective tax rate is, you have to go beneath the top-line rate and account for all the loopholes, subsidies and write-offs - and the way to do that is by looking at corporate tax revenues as a percentage of a country's GDP. That way, you know how much corporations are actually paying as a share of your overall economy - in other words, you know the real corporate tax rate, not the fake one advertised by top-line numbers. And when you look at America's tax structure through this lens, you see that even the Bush Treasury Department admits we have the second lowest effective corporate tax rate in the industrialized world (see page 42 of this report).

Indeed, this explains the dissonance between Republican claims of "highest corporate income tax rate in the world" and the recent Government Accountability report showing that most corporations pay no corporate income taxes at all. The latter is the truth - most corporations don't pay any taxes because of loopholes, writeoffs and subsidies that allow them to effectively reduce that 35 percent corporate tax rate to zero. In fact, many profitable corporations actually collect tax rebates. But as I told Fox News, we don't hear criticism of that kind of "corporate welfare" from the Republican mouthpieces deriding Obama's middle-class tax cuts as welfare.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2008104321/memo-fox-news-gop-america-has-second-lowest-business-taxes-world

[godai]

1. Ahhh....so it's the loopholes, subsidies and write-offs that expose this scam.

I always hear McCain spouting off about the 2nd highest business tax rate but it the DEDUCTIONS that tell the whole story. Similarly, he talks about 50% of the INCOME from small businesses being subject to Obama's tax proposal. But that's from only 5% of all small businesses.

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. Its a good article that debunks a right wing talking point

That we hear all the time on TV

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. dupe delete n/t

[endthewar]

5. We should just start with the assumption that McCain is lying

and then figure out the reasoning behind his lies.

[unpossibles]

4. thanks for the link! nt

[many a good man]

6. Great find! I've been looking for this information

Kick to the high heavens!

:kick: