Ignore corporate whining

Doug Henwood




Ignore corporate whining

Posted: 31 Mar 2021 10:16 AM PDT


Joe Biden is proposing to finance his badly needed infrastructure program by raising corporate taxes. Business mostly likes the infrastructure program—everything works better when the basics aren’t falling apart—but it doesn’t want to pay for it. Nobody likes paying taxes (well, maybe some oddballs do, but to each their own), but over the last few years, Corporate America has been enjoying the lightest tax burden in history. That needs to change.

Graphed below is the effective tax rate—the share of income that’s paid in tax, not the rate that’s on the books, which nobody pays—for nonfinancial corporations, the motor of the economy, based on data from the national income accounts. In 2020, firms paid 16.8% of their profits in taxes, about the same as 2019 and up slightly from 2018’s 15.0%. That rate, as the dotted trendline shows, has been declining steadily for decades, though the Trump tax cuts took it to fresh lows. As recently as 2005–2007, firms were paying almost 30%. In the 1970s, the average tax rate was over 40%; in the 1950s, almost 50%.



Translating those percentages into dollar terms produces some big numbers. If business were paying taxes at 2007 rates, another $162 billion a year would be flowing into the Treasury, enough to cover the $2 trillion pricetag on the infrastructure bill in 12 years. Take corporate taxes back to 1950s rates—not exactly a time when the capitalist class was suffering—and you could pay the entire infrastructure tab in five years.

And these profit figures are based on what companies report to the IRS, adjusted by the Bureau of Economic analysis to compensate for the more egregious tax breaks. It doesn’t account for all the trillions stashed in offshore tax havens.

They’ve got the money. They just don’t want to share.