The Truth About The U.S. Corporate Tax Rate The Right-Wing Media Doesn't Want You To Know

[Bill USA]

http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/05/01/the-truth-about-the-us-corporate-tax-rate-the-r/184586

Krugman Responds To Claim That Corporate Taxes Are The Highest In The World: "Nothing You Said About Business Taxes Is Actually True." On the April 29 edition of This Week with George Stephanopoulos, former Republican senatorial candidate and former Hewlett-Packard CEO claimed that the United States has "the single highest business tax rate the in the world," and that high taxes cause job losses and stalls economic growth. Krugman responded that none of Fiorina's claims was "actually true":

[div class="excerpt" style="background: #ddddff;"]
KRUGMAN: Nothing you said about business taxes is actually true.

FIORINA: Everything I said about business taxes is true.

KRUGMAN: We can have that discussion in one place, but it's not true.

FIORINA: This isn't an academic discussion, it's clear here.

KRUGMAN: If you look at the actual tax collections in the United States on business, they're lower than other advanced countries. And if you look at the alleged finding that high business taxes cause job losses in states, it goes way on even the -- kick the tires even slightly and the whole thing falls apart. It's just not true. [ABC, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, 4/29/12]

Studies Support Krugman: U.S. Corporate Tax Rates Are Similar To Other Countries

CRS: U.S. Has A Slightly Lower "GDP Weighted Average" Corporate Tax Rate Than Other OECD Countries. A March 31, 2011, Congressional Research Service (CRS) report titled "International Corporate Tax Rate Comparisons and Policy Implications," compared the weighted average of corporate tax rates in the United States and in other countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It found that the United States has an effective corporate tax rate of 27.1%, compared to the OECD (excluding the United States) average of 27.7%. From the report:


[div class="excerpt" style="background: #ddddff;"]If tax rates are not weighted, then a small economy, such as Iceland, can have the same effect on the average of international rates as a large economy, such as Germany or Japan. In general, smaller countries tend to have lower tax rates and thus unweighted averages are lower than weighted averages in most cases. In the results presented in this report, both weighted and unweighted averages are reported, but weighted averages are more relevant to making comparisons of measures of the tax burden on capital deployed around the world.

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