Lawmakers and candidates on all sides of the political spectrum acknowledge reforming America’s corporate tax rate is overdue. President Obama has even suggested reducing the rate from 35% to 28%. Writing for Reason, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center sums up the necessity for this, concluding it’s an optimal way to benefit both businesses and the workforce:
Even such high-tax nations as France have lower rates. However, the real competition comes from Canada (26.1 percent), Denmark (25 percent), the United Kingdom (20 percent) and the many countries, such as Ireland (12.5 percent), with rates below 20 percent. Moreover, competition is intensifying. Last June, the U.K. announced that it would cut its rate from 20 percent to 18 percent in the next five years. It’s now saying that it will lower the rate even further, to 17 percent. These reductions are the final stage of drastic cuts implemented since 2007, when the country’s companies faced a 30 percent tax rate. That’s a second wave of reduction since the rate was as high as 54 percent in the 1980s.
Now contrast this with the United States. In the 1980s, policymakers responded to the pressure put on by many countries lowering their corporate rates by decreasing America’s rate from 49.7 percent to 33 percent. However, since then, the U.S. has fallen asleep on the switch (and even raised the rate by 1 percentage point in the 1990s) and is now widely out of sync with internal competition. In 2015, the average corporate rate for countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was 25 percent, down from 48 percent in the early 1980s.
As if that were not enough competition for American companies, the U.S. government burdens them with another layer by taxing them on a worldwide basis. In that system, income from American companies is subject to U.S. taxes whether it’s earned in Seattle, Paris or Singapore. By contrast, most wealthy countries don’t tax foreign business income; about half of OECD nations have “territorial” systems that tax firms only on domestic income. In other words, U.S. exporters face a much less competitive tax system than most of their biggest competitors…
Not everyone would like to reduce taxes on corporations, but everyone should. The data show that most of the corporate tax burden is actually shifted to workers, who end up shouldering the tax in the form of lower wages. With the U.K. taking further measures to reduce its burden on corporations, boosting its workers’ wages and inflicting yet another blow to U.S. competitiveness, Congress should do what’s right by reforming the corporate tax. It may be the one bipartisan issue out there. All we need is leadership.