Except for the tax havens, corporations of all natioanalities believe that their tax load is bigger than the competitors across the border.
In March 1999, corporate tax reform was under the spotlight for the first tiem when Bob Perlman, then Vice President of Taxes for Intel Corporation, told the Senate Finance Committee that if he had known at Intel’s founding "what I know today about the international tax rules, I would have advised that the parent company be established outside the U.S. Our tax code competitively disadvantages multinationals simply because the parent is a U.S. corporation.”
Although tax burdens are hard to quantify because they are often passed down to consumers in the form of higher priced semiconductors and microprocessors, the corporate income tax rate has actually been coming down worldwide for the last several years, much of it a Western response to their domiciled multinationals relocating major parts of their taxable income offshore. Whether it's China lowering its statutory corporate income tax rate from 33% to 25% in 2008, or the U.S. cutting corporate income taxes from 39% from 35%, companies rarely ever pay the full load. There are write-offs and tax credits that bring the tax bill down a few basis points below the actual tax rate.
In fact, while U.S. corporations (and many supporting politicians) argue that American tax rates are too high, the average U.S. corporate income tax is just one percentage point below the median effective rate of their peers in the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD.
Click on the slideshow image to see where corporations are paying nothing, and where over a third of their profits go to the government.
See: Are US Companies Paying Too Much Taxes
See: We Don't Need To Cut Corporate Taxes, We Need To Raise Them
