WhatFinger

Admits raising corporate rates to their current astronomical level

Bill Clinton: Hey, let's end tax inversions by lowering the corporate tax rate!

By Robert Laurie ——--September 24, 2014

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According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States currently has the highest combined corporate income tax rate in the industrialized world.
This has caused the phenomena known as "tax inversions" where a company absorbs a foreign corporation (usually a competitor) and relocates their business operations to the newly involved country. Obviously, we just watched this happen with the Burger King / Tim Horton's buyout, which saw the Whopper head north of the border to take advantage of Canada's lower tax rates. The practice has the left screaming about how greedy and evil these horrific companies are. Barack Obama has called it "unpatriotic" and he's currently working on a raft of executive actions designed to make inversions less attractive. Of course, he's not arguing for lower corporate taxes, but one prominent liberal is.
While speaking with CNBC, Former President Bill Clinton admitted to bearing some of the responsibility for our currently astronomical corporate tax rates, and even suggested lowering them. As the New York Times reports:
When asked whether inversions — the practice of American companies acquiring a small overseas rival and reincorporating abroad to lower their tax bills — are unpatriotic, as many critics say, Mr. Clinton said that publicly traded companies, in particular, “feel duty bound to pay the lowest taxes they can pay.” “I should make full disclosure here,” Mr. Clinton told CNBC’s Becky Quick. “I signed and supported the bill that raised the corporate taxes in America to the level they are now.” But, he said it was a different environment when he was in office. “We were deciding we had to reduce the deficit to get interest rates down and spark an investment boom in America, and it worked,” Mr. Clinton said. The former president added that it’s Treasury Secretary Jacob L. Lew’s job to get as much revenue as possible from corporations, but that the tax rate should not be higher than the average rate of countries in the the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D. “We have the highest overall corporate tax rates in the world, and we are now the only O.E.C.D. country that also taxes overseas earnings,” Mr. Clinton said. “A lot of these executives, even if they wanted to bring the money home, they think this is crazy.”
Along with the lower taxes Clinton would like to see a variety of loopholes closed which, of course, is pretty much the exact argument that Republicans have been making for years. However, it usually falls on the deaf ears of statist sheep who love to scream about the evils of capitalism and yap about how the tax rates are actually too low. Currently, the OECD simple average stands at 25%, meaning that Clinton could be advocating as much as a 14% cut. Even if he's speaking of the weighted average, that would still be a 10% drop. It may have taken him fifteen years too long, but it's nice that the former President seen the error of his ways. We assume his newfound love of lower taxes will last right up until the very moment that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton issues some shrill proclamation about how companies "don't pay their fair share." Then, it's back to tax-and-spend.

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Robert Laurie——

Robert Laurie’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain.com

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