The Highest Corporate Tax In The Developed World

It's official, we now have the highest corporate tax rate in the world at 35%. This from Heritage:

This April Fool’s Day, the joke is on all of us. That’s because as of April 1, the U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world.

Our high corporate tax rate has long made the U.S. an uncompetitive place for new investment. This has driven new jobs to other, more competitive nations and meant fewer jobs and lower wages for all Americans.

Other developed nations have been cutting their rates for over 20 years. The U.S. did nothing.

The U.S. was at least able to stay out of the top spot until now, because Japan had also failed to get its corporate tax rate in line with other more competitive nations. . . .

The U.S. rate is well above the 25 percent average of other developed nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In fact, the U.S. rate is almost 15 percentage points higher than the OECD average.

This gaping disparity means every other country that we compete with for new investment is better situated to land that new investment and the jobs that come with it, because the after-tax return from that investment promises to be higher in those lower-taxed nations.

Our high rate also makes our businesses prime targets for takeovers by businesses headquartered in foreign countries, because their worldwide profits are no longer subject to the highest-in-the-world U.S. corporate tax rate. Until Congress cuts the rate, more and more iconic U.S. businesses such as Anheuser-Busch (which was bought by its Belgian competitor InBev in 2008) will be bought by their foreign competitors.

Republicans have been trumpeting their willingness to make a bipartisan deal on this issue virtually since Obama came to office. Obama has poisoned every chance for a deal with an insistence on punishing oil companies as part of any corporate tax deal - he would take away the tax breaks from oil companies available to every other U.S. business - and in addition, he wants to impose a tax on corporate profits earned overseas, all under the guise of fairness. Who needs a functioning, growing economy when we can have a "fair" one, anyway. That is the very definition of socialism, as well as its greatest ill.

Tweet