The Corner

Politics & Policy

Which Taxes? A Clarification

Commentator Sally Kohn seems confused. She attacks the bipartisan consensus (here’s the Democratic Ways and Means Committee dissenting from the GOP tax bill but supporting corporate tax reform) that the US’s corporate taxes are too high by citing a chart of taxes in general.

However, when you actually look at corporate taxes (via The Economist), the US has the highest rate in the developed world.

As I’ve said before, bad arguments don’t contribute to good policy debate. It was ridiculous when Donald Trump took the US’s high corporate tax rate to make a baseless aggregate claim. It is equally ridiculous for Sally Kohn to take the US’s low aggregate rates to make a specific claim about corporate taxes.

The chart she uses would have looked the same if the US had passed sweeping tax cuts for the ultra-rich with hikes for the middle class to balance it out. Would that be acceptable? I don’t think so either.

 

 

Jibran Khan is the Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at the National Review Institute.
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