Obama's Corporate Tax Reform Proposals

* Corporations incur taxes at the corporate level at marginal rates; while, distributions to shareholders are taxed at dividend rate

In the article “Job One: Tax Code Rewrite,” William O’Keefe, an author who cares about tax reform, argues that the Obama Administration should rewrite the tax code in order to reduce the unemployment rate. He supports this claim with a formal tone by using opinions and anecdotes as evidence. According to William, we need “systematic reforms to our tax code and regulatory policy.” The author targets a tax reform audience that cares about the economy. William’s purpose is to persuade readers that Obama’s stimulus tax bill will not help the economy or business in the long run. This work is significant because it challenges the Obama Administration to rethink their priorities.

Another idea would be to avoid increasing the tax rates as this will help “minimize economic distortions that shrink the level of production” (Baker III, 2009, p. 1). To promote economic growth, our team recommends that we take the approach of increasing the corporate tax base and decreasing the corporate tax rates. Other suggestion is to reduce the deductibility of state and local taxes. Other reforms that could be looked

With the advancements in the globalization of the economy, corporations are finding more ways to avoid the extraordinary tax rates set in place of The United States Of America. With the loss of revenue from large companies dodging taxes the government must make up for the loss by either raising taxes or changing the tax code. A recent company to avoid american taxes is Johnson Controls, a company that “…would not exist as it is today but for American taxpayers, who paid $80 billion in 2008…”(The Editorial Board). This use of American resources to get through tough times, and run to another county during an economic incline is an act that calls for reform in the American tax system. However congress has not passed any legislation to fix the

interest in the company. On the one hand, they can enjoy tax efficiency by paying tax of

Both coauthors explain “the myth of corporate taxes” with two statements: “When it comes down to it, no corporation or business really pays taxes,” and therefore, “the burden of it all falls on us [the taxpayers]” (32). They continue their explanation with another claim: “The economic education of Americans is so woefully inadequate that many of us actually think we pay less as individuals when the taxes are transferred to businesses and corporations” (31). To illustrate their point, the authors created a fictional corporation with simple guidelines. Although not their actual example, the following is similar: Qwerty Inc., a manufacturer of computer keyboards, has 200 employees and 100 shareholders. At the end of the year, Qwerty Inc. sold 1000 keyboards at $100 dollars each; therefore, the yearly income was $100,000. After labor, cost, taxes, and other charges, Qwerty’s profit is $2000 for the year. If the government adds a 10% corporate tax increase, Qwerty now owes an additional $200 in taxes. According to Boortz and Linder’s logic, Qwerty has several possibilities to balance the budget from the tax increase: the shareholders could see their dividends decrease, the price on the keyboards could be raised, some employees could be fired to save on cost, or employee benefits could decrease to cover the cost of the tax increase. This simple example demonstrates the current tax code’s consequences on the taxpayers (citizens and consumers) and introduces “the embedded

The less taxes we pay, the more lives we save. The United States has the highest corporate tax rate of the 34 developed, free market nations that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (DECD). Unlike other countries, the United States pays a marginal corporate tax rate of 35% at the federal level and 39.2% state taxes are accounted. This is causing thousands of corporations to move operations out of the United States and into other countries. Therefore, the United States should lower the taxes of big corporations.

Throughout years large American industrial companies have been running away from U.S. taxes, but there has been a new change. Companies such as Apple and Google have been affected by a change foreign countries are going through collecting higher taxes than before. It seems as if no longer can these companies get away with paying low taxes. This is happening because the European Commission have passed an order to collect high taxes. One example is Ireland who was ordered to collect fourteen billion dollars from Apple, which brought a surprise to this company. Companies have run out of places to run and pay one percent or less of taxes in foreign places, instead of paying back home.

With the presidential elections coming up, different tax policies are being debated between the candidates. Whether it is proposed by a Democratic or a Republican presidential candidate, there have been many possible solutions presented on how to reform the current tax code. Focusing specifically on four candidates, two from the Democratic Party, and two from the Republican Party, I will compare and contrast their respective tax proposals. While the Democratic candidates generally agree with President Obama’s current tax code, all four candidates are looking to reform it in some way in order to, in their own eyes, better the current tax code affecting today’s citizens.

Companies in the US are finding clever deceiving ways to get what they want. Many companies like Google are investing offshore to avoid American taxes. Others like the company Monsanto uses

Bull, Dowd, and Moomau (2011) analyzed the macroeconomic perspectives of corporate tax reform. The researchers indicated that it is important to consider changes in tax treatment – reduce a current rate from 35 percent to 30, and eliminate various loopholes in the

When Americans think politics, the first person that comes to mind is the current president. We either love him or love to hate him, with very few of us falling in between. Why is this? Like all humans, we Americans consider what’s best for us and our wellbeing when making any decision or facing any tradeoff. If your local Congressman does casework for you, you’re more likely to vote them back into office. If President Obama’s stimulus plan gave you a job when you were struggling to find work, you’re going to support him and the candidates he endorses. When we consider what personal benefit is and means, we come to one, saddening but understandable conclusion: it’s all about the money. This is for good reason; money gives us food, shelter, and water. It’s the way we get what we need to survive, and if we’re fortunate, it’s also the way we get things we want. The leading way to measure that economic wealth on a large scale is through Gross Domestic Product, hereafter referred to as GDP. When we see a President implementing policies, and then we see more money coming into our bank accounts, we can’t help but associate the two as cause and effect. Using this associative logic, when we compare presidential approval ratings to GDP growth or decline, we see that economic wellbeing has an irrefutably large influence on public opinion.

Intercompany transactions could occur across national borders, it would lead MNC companies to get more exposure to the differences of the tax regulations between countries. This might lead MNC companies to set up their objective to minimize their taxes through the use of discretionary transfer prices. These issues are attracted the attention of the member of the U.S. senate, foreign governments and international organization such as the OECD, G20 and European Union (EU).

Whilst William McBride, chief economist for Tax Foundation website, sided with tax cut policy saying that to strengthen the financial state, “we should lower taxes on the earnings of capital,” “workers and the businesses that hire them,” Chye-ching Huang and Nathaniel Frentz, both are senior Tax Policy analysts, completely debunked the evidence McBride provided to support his argument, which includes the review of twenty-three among twenty-six studies he thought to advocate the idea. Indeed, as one conducts research, regardless of what sources it comes from, agreement over tax issue should never be found as a unanimous answer. One of the reasons why it is so difficult to reach a definite conclusion rests on the fact that although some statistics may show economic growth was in step with tax cut, correlation does not mean causation: just as ice-cream sale and murder rate increase during summer time, it is baseless to assume that higher ice-cream consumption leads to higher odds for crime. Moreover, because there is a great amount of research has been done on taxes, different interpretations from these data are understandable. Before concluding that “nearly every empirical study of taxes and economic growth published in a peer reviewed academic journal” finds cutting taxes improves the financial status quo, thus, people need to consider

The United States is in a recession; it has been facing some of the worse economic times since the Great Depression in the 1930’s. One option to fix the economy is to change the corporate tax rate. To lower it or to raise it, that is the question economists have been speculating. America's high corporate tax rate and worldwide system of taxation discourages U.S. companies from sending their foreign-source revenue home, which makes U.S. companies defenseless to foreign acquisition from the international opponents (Camp). Corporations and United States citizens have been fighting for a tax reform, which would hopefully help the American economy; either by lowering the corporate tax, or by raising the tax.