Our corporate income tax

Cato tells it like it is:

The United States should be a leader but has fallen behind on tax reform. For example, the United States now has one of the highest corporate tax rates among major nations. The chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, Glenn Hubbard, believes that “from an income tax perspective, the United States has become one of the least attractive industrial countries in which to locate the headquarters of a multinational corporation.” …

One-third of the sales of the 500 largest U.S. companies is now from their foreign affiliates. …

A new survey by the accounting firm KPMG, which takes into account both national and subnational taxes, found that the average 40 percent U.S. federal and state corporate rate combined is almost 9 percentage points higher than the OECD average in 2002 of 31.4 percent. …

In all there are six often-overlapping anti-deferral regimes that create a complex web for Americans to navigate through when investing abroad. The U.S. international tax rules are generally considered the most complex and aggressive among the industrial nations. In a 1999 report, the National Foreign Trade Council concluded that “U.S. anti-deferral rules have been subject to constant legislative tinkering, which has created both instability and a forbiddingly arcane web of rules, exceptions, exceptions to exceptions, interactions, cross references, and effective dates, giving rise to a level of complexity that is intolerable.” …

The complexity of tax rules on U.S. foreign income is so great that one estimate found that 46 percent of federal tax compliance costs for Fortune 500 companies stemmed from rules on foreign income. As a result, U.S. companies are at a tax disadvantage in world markets. … Intel’s vice president for taxes testified before Congress that, “if I had known at Intel’s founding what I know today about the international tax rules, I would have advised that the parent company be established outside of the U.S.”

Thanks to RegionsofMind for the link. My bottom line: I’d rather have cut the corporate income tax than have cut the tax on dividends.