As Paul Krugman writes, there's a lot of mathematical trickery going into the claim that America makes its corporations pay crazily high taxes. But that's nothing compared the odd idea that we have to kick the legs out of our revenue collection in order to fend off challenges from...Greece and Ireland. Operating costs are cheaper in smaller, less advanced countries, and much cheaper in smaller, much less advanced countries. The US shouldn't try to compete with China on labor costs nor Greece on rates of corporate taxation. That said, there's a good case for simplifying the corporate tax code so that the "statutory" rate is closer to the actual rate paid, but there's very little reason to believe our economy is straining under the weight of prohibitive corporate taxation. On the other hand, it's very easy for think tanks who launch big campaigns decrying prohibitively high corporate taxation rates to...get funded by corporations. Rational economic actors and all that.
