Not much gets people riled up more than differing opinions on taxation. Throughout the history of our country, many other issues have been debated and even battled over and then resolved. No disagreement has endured the test of time more than the argument over taxes.
The current right-wing division of the Republican Party was not the first tea party. The Boston Tea Party, during which a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians dumped $18,000 worth of British tea into the Boston harbor, was the original. Many of you might think it happened because the British raised taxes on tea. Not so. The British government lowered the tax on tea and gave the failing East India Company a complete monopoly on the American tea trade in order to prop it up. The protesting colonists took matters into their own hands and destroyed it.
The corporate tax rates in different countries we trade with, levied by each government, can directly affect our economy. The current Republican tax plan, now in committee, would lower the corporate tax rate from over 39% down to 20%. That has people on the left protesting that it will take money from programs benefiting poor people, funded by taxes, and allowing it to remain in wealthy corporations. It has people on the right saying it will grow the economy and create more jobs.
What most don’t know is that members of both political parties, at the governing level, want the corporate rate reduced. Yes, that means Democrats too. Both parties agree that changing the corporate rate has little to do with the rich getting richer or jobs being created. Our legislators understand that we are in a global economy, and the rate corporations are taxed in the U.S. is effectively the highest in the world. In fact, it is more than double of some of our major competitors, such as China and Mexico.
Our corporate tax rate here is lower than only two other places in the world. The United Arab Emirates, with a population of only 1.4 million, and Puerto Rico, which isn’t a country, but a territory of the U.S.
Many of the major players in the world economy have been reducing their corporate tax rates to be more competitive, and all their corporate tax rates are already lower than ours. We’ve not followed suit, creating incentives for U.S. companies to move assets, jobs, and headquarters to countries with attractive corporate rates.
Many aspects of the current tax plan may be argued on both sides of the aisle and even among the members of their own party, but you will hear very little serious objection to reducing the corporate rate. Yes, the Democratic Party engages in saber-rattling with due diligence to their constituents. In reality, though they might not want it lowered as much, they recognize that the river of jobs and money flowing out of the country must be halted for the good of us all.
Taxes will forever be a hot topic and always unfair to some, but a corporate tax reduction will benefit us all. That’s how I see it.