War is Peace

As I mentioned a little while back, even as the rhetoric about high taxes persists, the total tax burden on U.S. taxpayers has hit historic lows.  Now, Bruce Bartlitt, former Reagan and Bush(I) official, explains in this New York Times piece just how ridiculous the claims of high taxes are. He describes why "if taxes are low historically and in comparison with our global competitors, how ... Republicans [are] able to maintain that taxes are excessively high[.]" "They do so by ignoring the effective tax rate and concentrating solely on the statutory tax rate, which is often manipulated to make it appear that rates are much higher than they really are." And, to rebut "[t]he GOP [claim that] global competitiveness requires the United States to reduce its corporate tax rate," he's got a cute little chart showing that effective U.S. corporate tax rates are the lowest in the developed world. He then ends with this thought: "The truth of the matter is that federal taxes in the United States are very low. There is no reason to believe that reducing them further will do anything to raise growth or reduce unemployment."