The
nominal rate of corporate tax is amongst the highest in the world. The
effective rate of corporate tax is amongst the lowest in the world.
ataxingmatter: Tax Foundation and Competitive Environments: more bunk!
After the Great Depression, FDR put this nation back to work, in part by raising taxes on income above $3 to $4 million a year to 91 percent, and corporate taxes to over 50% of profits. It didnÂ’t kill the economy.
The revenue from those income taxes built dams, roads, bridges, sewers, water systems, schools, hospitals, train stations, railways, an interstate highway system, and airports. It educated a generation returning from World War II. It acted as a cap on the rare but occasional obsessively greedy person taking so much out of the economy that it impoverished the rest of us. Though, more and more loopholes for the rich were built into the tax code, so much so that JFK observed in his second debate with Nixon that dropping the top tax rate to 70% but tightening up the loopholes would actually be a tax increase.
So through loopholes, the rich are not paying their fair share in taxes. It is a fact you will most definitely ignore.
JFK pushed through a tax increase to take us back toward FDR/Truman/Eisenhower revenue levels, and we continued to build infrastructure in the US, and even put men on the moon. Health care and college were cheap and widely available. Working people could raise a family and have security in their old age. Every billion dollars invested in infrastructure in America created 47,000 good-paying jobs as Americans built America.
But the rich fought back, and won big-time in 1980 when Reagan won. Reagan promptly cut income taxes on the very rich from 70% down to 27%. Corporate tax rates were also cut so severely that they went from representing over 33% of total federal tax receipts in 1951 to less than 9% in 1983 (theyÂ’re still in that neighborhood, the lowest in the industrialized world).
The result was devastating. Our government was suddenly so badly awash in red ink that Reagan doubled the tax paid only by people earning less than $40,000/year (FICA), and then began borrowing from the huge surplus this new tax was accumulating in the Social Security Trust Fund. Even with that, Reagan had to borrow more money in his 8 years than the sum total of all presidents from George Washington to Jimmy Carter combined.
In addition to badly throwing the nation into debt, ReaganÂ’s tax cut blew out the ceiling on the accumulation of wealth, leading to a new Gilded Age and the rise of a generation of super-wealthy that hadnÂ’t been seen since the Robber Baron era of the 1890s or the Roaring 20s.
And, most tragically, ReaganÂ’s tax cuts caused America to stop investing in infrastructure.
