When he was in Ghana this weekend, the president tried to encourage African governments to embrace institutions that promote economic growth. He said, “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top.” You go, president Obama.

However, he doesn’t think that American businesses deserve the same treatment. The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent (at the federal level). That’s the second highest of all the OECD countries. It’s higher than France and Sweden. If you add the state rate, that’s an average of 40 percent. And yet, he wants to reform the system in a way that that would punish U.S. firms by closing the loopholes that allow them survive competition abroad.

In my Reason column this month, I look at president Obama’s corporate tax reform proposal. It’s not pretty.

President Barack Obama is very insistent on the need to “save American jobs.” The spending and the Buy American provisions of his massive stimulus package, approved by Congress in February, were meant to “create or save” millions of U.S. jobs. “Saving jobs” was also the stated goal of his recent pledge to eliminate tax advantages for companies that do business overseas. But instead of saving American jobs, Obama’s new corporate tax is apt to worsen what is already the highest unemployment since 1983 and make America’s companies even less competitive in the global marketplace.

Read the whole thing here.