About that Yarn That Reducing Corporate Income Taxes Decreases Unemployment and Spurs the Economy

Many erroneous ideas are at the root of prevailing evidence-unsubstantiated political and economic memes in Washington D.C.

Concerning the issue of more or less corporate taxation, the hordes of uninformed people in the U.S. Congress might consider examining the following:

• A graph of the comparison of the U.S. corporate tax rate and the unemployment rate from 1950 to 2010:
  
  SEE at procon.org (Pros and Cons  of Controversial Issues): Unemployment rate vs. Corporate Tax as % of GDPCorporate tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, 1950-2010, Source: Michael Diedrich, "Graph of the Day: Jobs and Taxes," mn2020hindsight.org, Oct. 20, 2011,
  showing clearly that the one has nothing to do with the other.


• William Lazonick, Profits Without Prosperity, Harvard Business Review, September 2014, which indicates that increased money in corporate hands goes straight into the pockets of already over-compensated executives.


• Generally, TaxProfBlog and Paul Caron at Northwestern Symposium: 100 Years Under the Income Tax, e.g. Adam H. Rosenzweig , A Corporate Tax for the Next One Hundred Years: A Proposal for a Dynamic, Self-Adjusting Tax Rate, Northwestern University Law Review, Vol.  108,  No.  3 (2014), which points to many of the problems involved in thinking that "corporations" PAY income taxes. In fact, SOMEBODY else foots the bill, i.e. stockholders, wage-earners, consumers. Corporations are simply legal fictions and themselves pay nothing -- it is people who pay. The right question is -- which people are pocketing and which people are paying?


• Corporate Profits of Low-Wage Employers, National Employment Law Project, showing that low-wage employees, who mostly work for large corporations, see no share of increased corporate monies.


• U.S. Unemployment Rate 1947-2014, and read Does Lowering the Federal Corporate Income Tax Rate Create Jobs?, at ProCon.org. (Pros and Cons  of Controversial Issues)