Canadian Columnist Urges Radical Corporate Tax Rate Reduction

Highlighting a recent OECD report that admitted the benefits of tax competition and lower tax rates, a Canadian columnist warns that Canada’s high corporate tax rate is making the nation less competitive. All of the arguments apply even more forcefully to the United States, where the corporate tax rate is about six percentage points higher:

…capital and skilled labour are highly mobile these days. Countries compete aggressively for both with lower and lower tax rates. …The OECD says this competition for lower corporate and personal tax rates will continue. “Globalization favours greater tax competition,” the OECD report says. “It encourages the pursuit of efficiency gains in tax systems — by shifting tax burdens away from capital and labour and toward property and consumption.” …In a single decade, competition has reduced corporate tax rates around the world, the OECD report notes, “in some countries by a considerable amount.” In 1996, the highest corporate tax rate in the world was 60 per cent; in 2006, the highest rate is 40 per cent. …What will the highest rate be a decade hence? Twenty per cent? Ten per cent? Zero per cent? …Whatever the number, it will be much less than 28 per cent and it will necessarily determine Canada’s rate — unless we are not interested in attracting investment capital and highly skilled workers from abroad (or keeping our own from going abroad). Mr. Flaherty’s commitment to lower our corporate rate to 30 per cent over the next five years means his success will in fact ensure failure. You can’t pass the puck to the spot where the receiver now is — he won’t still be waiting there. Mr. Flaherty needs to pass ahead to the receiver’s future position, which requires a corporate rate of less than 20 per cent by 2011. This ought to be easy. No country has yet hurt itself by reducing tax rates, corporate or personal. …the OECD report tracks the steep decline in corporate rates in one, the subsequent compelling rise in tax revenue in the other. In one decade, the world effectively cut its corporate tax rate in half — and doubled the revenue it gets from it. This is the Laffer Curve, vindicated again. The Laffer Curve expresses a simple, incontrovertible proposition: that decreases in tax rates can increase tax revenue.