Veronique de Rugy, writing in Reason, on corporate tax rates:
The U.S. corporate tax rate is simply too high. When you add state corporate taxes to the 35 percent federal rate, you arrive at a whopping 40 percent average corporate tax burden, the second highest among the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Economists are in broad agreement that cutting the corporate rate is a national priority. In a 2002 study, American Enterprise Institute economists Kevin Hassett and Eric Engen argued that the most efficient corporate tax rate is zero. The mobility of capital income means that even a small amount of tax introduces large distortions into an economy as capital flies away to a lower tax environment. More interesting, if counterintuitive, is the fact that because of capital mobility the people who stand to benefit most from a corporate tax cut are workers. In a 2006 study, the economist William C. Randolph of the Congressional Budget Office concluded that “domestic labor bears slightly more than 70 percent of the burden” imposed by corporate taxes.
Not only is the U.S. rate too high, but the U.S. government also taxes corporations on their worldwide income.
And President Obama wants to make it even harder for American corporations to compete globally:
Several nations, most recently including Japan and Britain, are moving to a territorial system, taxing only corporate profits earned within their borders. By contrast, Obama is proposing to move in the opposite direction: He wants to make U.S. companies doing business abroad as miserable as U.S. companies doing business at home.
