Are U.S. Corporate Taxes Low? [Are Government Workers Overpaid?]

ATR ^ | 2011-06-02 | Chris Edwards

[92nina]

...This statistic does not show what Bruce pretends it shows. Corporate income taxes are paid by a subset of businesses called “C” corporations. But the share of total U.S. business income reported by C corporations has plunged in recent decades with the rise in other business structures, particularly LLCs and S corporations. In a 2007 article in Tax Notes, PwC economist Peter Merrill showed that the share of total U.S. business income reported by C corporations fell from 71 percent in 1987 to just 49 percent by 2004. C corporations are less important business structures than they used to be, so it is to be expected that corporate taxes as a share of GDP has fallen. Another way to see the relative decline in C corporations is to look at the ratio of C corporation revenues to GDP. In 1980, for example, C corporation revenues were more than two times larger than GDP ($6.1 trillion to $2.8 billion), but by 2008 C corporation revenues were only about 1.5 times larger than GDP ($22 trillion to $14 trillion)...

Read more: http://www.atr.org/u-s-corporate-taxes-low-a6208#ixzz1OEYc47Jv

[92nina]

The Canadians are lowering their corporate tax rate; the United States, not so much.

Take this article and others I found to the fight to the Libs on their own turf; put the Left on the defensive at at Digg and at Reddit and in Delicious and Stumbleupon

[scooby321]

As Japan lowered its Corporate Tax

USA is number 1

[Redbob]

They just keep on missing the point, don’t they?

Corporations don’t pay taxes.

Their customers and shareholders pay taxes, but no business “pays” a tax.
They pass it on to their customers, or deduct it from their profits, and therefore from payments to shareholders.

[ex-snook]

"Their customers and shareholders pay taxes, but no business “pays” a tax."

So why do they care what the tax rate is?

[Ratman83]

It raises thier costs both the tax itself but also the cost to collect and pass it on. Additionally if thier cost os higher than they have a disadvantage in the global market.

[Wuli]

“So why do they care what the tax rate is?”

Think about what you are saying!

Which is, akin to your saying:

“Why do they care about their costs, and as a result of their costs what they must charge their customers.” and “Why do they care about their shareholders return on investment, which results from their profitability and the markets’ appreciation of that profitability.”

To NOT care about your costs and thus what you have to charge your customers is to not care about your competitors, foreign or domestic. No business can afford, for long, to not care if their total costs are greater than their competitors, without risking losing customers.

To NOT care about your shareholders return on investment is to not care whether or not you can raise capital in public markets.

Of course corporations are concerned about their costs. The fact that in order to be profitable they must pass as much of them as possible to their customers - raw material costs, labor costs, energy costs, plant and equipment costs, marketing costs, AND taxes (and other costs) - in their pricing - does not remove substantial incentives to keep all those costs down when and where possible.