(Official Washington Examiner editorial, October 28) On corporate tax rates, former President Donald Trump’s position is demonstrably superior to Vice President Kamala Harris’s demagoguery.
As part of her tiresome schtick about how she is going to pay for all her promises by raising taxes on billionaires and corporations, literally an arithmetical impossibility by any reckoning, the Democrat Harris keeps bashing the Republican Trump for proposing “tax cuts for big corporations.” It is one of her most frequent attack lines.
Well, she’s darn right that Trump is doing that. It’s a tremendously wise thing for him to propose.
The corporate income tax is one of the flat-out dumbest taxes imaginable. The more a corporation is taxed, the more it either passes the taxes on to consumers in the form of higher prices or reduces hiring or perhaps gives worse dividends to its stockholders. Either way, it is a major drain on the economy.
Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that “domestic labor bears slightly more than 70% of the burden of the corporate income tax.” So much for Harris being on the side of laborers.
A high corporate income tax also leads to businesses large and small spending much more time on tax avoidance strategies than on growth-oriented endeavors, and it takes more time from IRS workers monitoring corporate compliance when they could be reassigned to the notoriously weak IRS help desk. It also benefits large businesses that can afford pricey accountants over small businesses that can’t.
Almost invariably, nations that cut their corporate income tax rates see almost immediate spurts, some of them vast, in economic growth and overall economic health. Consider the famous “Celtic Tiger” economic phenomenon in Ireland, during which that nation in a few short years rose from being one of Europe’s poorest to one of its richest. After it began a phased-in reduction of its corporate tax rate from 40% to 12.5% in 1996, Ireland’s growth rate more than doubled U.S. growth, and its per capita income surpassed ours. Moreover, tax revenue actually rose each year until the start of the worldwide recession, and average salaries increased each year, even during the 2008-10 recession.
Back in the United States, Republicans took notice…. [The full editorial is here.]