Nice try, but you fall woefully short in your assumption that they only taxes business' pay are on profits. Taxes in business are indeed levied on profits. They are also levied on the business based on each employee you have (SS and Medicare matching, and now Obamacare) each piece of equipment you use in your business (tangible property), you phone access (telephone tax), your energy use (electricity tax), not to mention all the hidden taxes, regulatory costs, massive liability insurance premiums and the list goes on and on.
Lowering corporate taxes would help produce a climate here that encourages business instead of a climate that is hostile to business. Many businesses today, like the engineering firm I founded and ran for over 20 years, compete with other similar businesses world wide. Having a lower corporate tax is but one spoke in the wheel of rebuilding a business friendly environment in the USA.
Many, if not most banks simply aren't lending now, especially to small business and start ups. Many investors, particularly venture capital types who seek out this type of investment are sitting on money right now, a lot of money. Many businesses are also hoarding money right now. There have been a half dozen stories on this phenomenon in the business rags over the past week alone. The reason they're hording money is because they don't know what Obama is going to do next and, as such, they can't plan for the future, not even just a few months out. A bunker mentality is building when we should be sending signals to business to come to the USA and prosper. If you want to free up this money lower or better yet eliminate the Capital Gains tax. By doing so people and companies would invest in small businesses (where historically the vast majority of jobs are created) millions of jobs will be created, additional tax revenue would flood into the gubmint coffers and we would be on a path to a modest recovery. Cut gubmint spending and focus on paying off the debt as rapidly as possible and we just might avoid the crash that's coming in a couple of years. Does it solve all the problems? Of course not, but it makes one hell of a lot more sense than raising the Capital Gains tax to 20%, raising marginal income tax rates across the board, continuing to allow the AMT to expand, continuing with a corporate tax rates that are the second highest in the industrialized world, and all the other things that are happening now, thanks to gubmint at local, state and Federal levels, that are directly in opposition to a recovering economy......
Nice try on your nice try. You said nothing about SS/Medicare tax or energy & telephone taxes, or liability insurance premiums. I'll remind you what you said...
"Eliminate the Capital Gains taxes and lower the corporate income taxes to 10% and our economy would explode. Think about all the investment capital that is just sitting idle out there right now. Manufacturing would flood back to the USA and we'd be at full employment again within 9-12 months."
Yep, it would be nice to have a lower corporate tax rate and a lower capital gains tax rate, but neither will have any substantive effect on the return of lost manufacturing jobs. Those are gone, probably forever. Business aren't going to close up their newly built off-shore manufacturing plants to move back to the US just so they can keep fractions more of their profits, especially when the operating costs in the US eat up MUCH more than the reduced tax rate would free.
OldDeckHand never promoted any such assumption. Indeed his primary point is that the bulk of government imposed business costs are outside the tax structure:
To see manufacturing return to the US in any substantive way, the federal and state governments will have to address the underlying fundamental reasons that manufacturing left in the first place - Regulatory burden, to especially include environmental regulation, the labor burden associated with the strong union presence in most of our Rustbelt states, and the high costs of health care and energy. Without addressing those concerns, our corporate tax rates are meaningless to our manufacturing base.
This is dead on. Even back in the mid 90's I worked at a plant where waste disposal for glycol (which is made from steeric acid rendered from cattle and which will composte to dirt if poured out on leaves) exceeded the labor costs in the plastics and diecasting departments at the plant where I worked. and that was just costs imposed on one biodegradable chemical. We wont go into costs that were then imposed on vent stacks.
No amount of tinkering with tax rates or putting more low interest loans out there addresses this greater problem. Those things are moot.