Posted on 08/14/2008 10:22:13 PM PDT by FocusNexus
The new international tax rankings are out for 2008, and congratulations to Washington, D.C., are again in order. Our political class has managed to maintain America's rank with the second highest corporate tax rate in the world at 39.3% (average combined federal and state).
For the first time, the U.S. statutory rate is now 50% higher than the average of our international competitors, continuing a long-term trend as the rest of the world keeps reducing corporate tax rates.
Last week Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota waved around a new politically generated study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finding that 28% of large U.S. corporations paid no income tax in 2005. "It's time for big corporations to pay their fair share," Mr. Dorgan roared.
Well, the Tax Foundation looked at those numbers and found that, among the large companies that paid no taxes, 85% of them also made no profits that year.
To correct this revenue dearth, Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress are proposing to pry more tax money out of U.S. companies that have profitable affiliates outside the U.S. Mr. Obama is also shamelessly taking the Byron Dorgan line that the problem is venal U.S. CEOs rather than the nutty U.S. tax code.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Indeed!...chuckle-snort-chuckle
FMCDH(BITS)
“A new OECD study, ‘Taxes and Economic Growth,’ examines national tax burdens and their impact on growth and incomes in member countries. It concludes that ‘corporate taxes are most harmful for growth, followed by personal income taxes, and then consumption taxes.’ The study adds that ‘investment is adversely affected by corporate taxation,’ and that the most profitable and rapidly growing companies tend to be the most sensitive to high business tax rates.”
IOW, the LEAST harmful taxes for economic growth are
1. consumption taxes
2. personal income taxes
3. corporate taxes
Global competitiveness should be one of the major issues of this political campaign. However, you hardly hear it mentioned by anyone - Democrat or Republican. The media certainly never brings it up.
So sad.
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