Economist Dean Baker posted today about taxing corporate profits.
His post is important because it demolishes one of the two arguments for a corporate tax cut, namely that taxing corporations is just too damn hard.
In a fairer world, the other argument for a corporate tax cut would collapse of it’s own weight. That argument: that we have to cut corporate taxes because all the other countries have lower taxes than us.
This after months of trying to “reform” healthcare without mentioning, ever, that healthcare in all those other countries was better and cheaper. All those heads resolutely looking away from the rest of the world. Watch those heads swivel en masse as the topic changes from health care to corporate taxes.
This is no time to abandon American exceptionalism! We have the highest corporate taxes because we’re better than the rest of the world. Our economy is better than Europe’s. Don’t let the elitists in Congress turn our country into another Greece.
Well, I guess I have to give you points for cleverly writing your headline to make it sound like a post about a different, though popular, topic of late!:)
I like the link, and the proposal to require corporations to pay taxes by transferring stock to the government.
I quibble with the final paragraph. The US has a high STATUTORY rate. This rate is about as real the “LIST PRICE” emblazoned on the side of any new automobile. Nobody pays that rate. NOBODY.
In fact, the actual effective US corporate tax rate is about the same as other nations like us.
The comparison to the health care industry is apt. The reason we have such a large gap between our sticker price and our actual price is to fund the astronomically high profits of the tax avoidance industry — the very industry that will profit most from the shenanigans being promoted by Mr. Trump and the the GOP.
The US is in no danger of being turned into another Greece. Cash (and wealth) is the lifeblood of a consumer economy. We are already being bled to death by the relentless appetite of the vampires that have been sucking us dry for decades. Mr. Trump is the newly-elected vampire-in-chief.
The proposed tax changes are just another spot on our collective up-turned neck that the vampires would like to open.
The real problem with Greece is a culture that accepts tax dodgers, especially in the professional class.