America's poor, overtaxed corporations

unfortunately, these numbers are meaningless, given the fact that this isn't an "income tax" but a tax on profits -- and the tax code has a zillion ways to shield corporate profits from taxation.

My heart goes out to the multi national corporations that have found ways to avoid paying taxes that would make Houdini proud.Since the 1950s corporations have been paying less and less of the total tax collected by the government.The tax rate could on the books be 99% if you are actually only paying 1% what is the real number.I say lets raise the tax on corporations until cheif executives are only making 100 times the average of the other employees in the company.If the corporations were really struggling under the tax burden I guess they have real problems getting their voice heard on Capitol hill where they have effectively made our representatives corporate lackeys.By the way the 3 countries that have the highest rates are three of the most successful countries in modern history.We culd go into who should pay the army when we go to war for oil or as you will see when the CIA releases its documents when we overthrow governments for the economic benefit of different companies in this country.

Justin
Do the tax rates you listed above for Germany and Spain include the VAT or are they only income taxes? Are the German and Spanish corporations actually paying much more in taxes?

Justin
It would be interesting to find out the average tax rate paid on income reported to stockholders for each of these countries.

How much would the stock markets decline if the income reported to the stockholders was the same number as income reported to the IRS? My off-the-cuff guess is about 60 percent.

(I know the number can be found or constructed from information in annual reports but it is not easy nor uniform.)

The Laffer curve is oversimplified BS...

To the author: Take your head out of your arse, corporations pay far too little taxes.

To Anonymous
There is an economic reason to eliminate all corporate income taxes. Millions of annual hours of time of smart managers, CPAs and lawyers is spent in trying to minimize those taxes. In addition hundreds of thousands of hours are spend by politicians and their staff thinking up ways to reduce or increase selected corporations income taxes. The opportunity cost of those smart people who otherwise might be able to do something productive with their brains and time is enormous.

Reduce corporate income taxes to zero and have all payments to individuals, other than employees and vendors, be subject to a (potentially refundable) withholding tax of 38 percent.

With the increased productivity and new wealth generation from the freed up managers, CPAs and lawyers, only a few of the many loopholes in personal income tax rates would have to be closed in order to make up for the loss of the US corporate income tax.

Given that at least in the US many corporations don't pay tax, perhaps a better measure would be total corporate tax as a percentage of GDP. You could throw in dividend taxes too. So (dividend taxes+corporate taxes)/GDP.