chip maker, Infineon Technologies, recently announced that it may
move its headquarters out of Germany partly because of that coun
try’s high tax burden (Nagl 2003).
Corporate tax rates also influence the financial structures of mul
tinational corporations. For example, there is concern regarding
“earnings stripping”today, which occurs when parent firms and their
affiliates use intercompany borrowing to shift profits from high-tax to
low-tax countries. The benefits of such transactions depend on the tax
rates in the two countries. As our trading partners have cut tax rates,
it is not surprising that the U.S. corporate tax is feeling pressure from
such tax avoidance techniques.
An important conclusion of public finance research is that in an
open-world economy countries should greatly reduce tax rates on
capital income (Engen and Hassett 2002). Higher tax rates raise the
required pretax return on investments, which reduces a country’s
capital stock and wages. In that situation, it would be more efficient
for a country, and better for workers, to tax wages directly. Corporate
profits are mobile in today’s economy, and thus should be taxed very
lightly, if at all, to maximize U.S. investment and gross domestic
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Flaws Intrinsic to the Corporate Income Tax
The corporate income tax was enacted in 1909 as an“excise”tax
(Blakey 1934: Section I). Since the Supreme Court had struck down
the income tax in 1895, attempts were made to work around the
Court’s decision and apply taxes to an income base.
1
The Corporation
Tax Act of 1909 applied a 1 percent tax on corporate net income,
based on the theory that it was an excise on the“privilege”of orga
nizing in the corporate form.
2
Support for the tax came from the
anti-big business movement that had grown in prior decades and from
tariff opponents who wanted to find a substitute revenue source
(Webber and Wildavsky 1986: 420).
Congress imposed the corporate tax on the very troublesome base
of net income or profits, which created substantial complexity from
the beginning. Indeed, the JCT was created in 1926 to study simpli
fication of the already complicated income tax. By the 1930s, experts
were lamenting all the basic income tax problems that cause distor-
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