We retired Tax Justice Blog in April 2017. For new content on issues related to tax justice, go to www.justtaxesblog.org
The GOP’s core philosophy about tax policy is perfectly distilled in its 2012 platform where it states simply that “[l]owering taxes promotes substantial economic growth.” What this one-sided analysis misses is that lower taxes do not promote economic growth, because they inevitably require (PDF) the government to either cut spending or to increase the deficit.
(Our GOP platform review Part II, Tax Ideas on the Fringe, is here.)
Supports More Individual Tax Cuts
The fact that the GOP platform does not make the connection between tax cuts and deficits is starkly demonstrated by the platform’s warning that the US faces an “unprecedented legacy of enormous and unsustainable debt,” while at the same time calling for a complete extension of the Bush tax cuts, at a cost of $5.4 trillion (PDF). While some GOP leaders like to say that tax cuts boost the economy so much that they pay for themselves, there is no evidence to support that claim, and even economists from the Bush Administration and a former Reagan advisor have conceded that over the long run, the Bush tax cuts have no real discernable affect on economic growth.
Supports More Corporate Tax Cuts
Another misguided tax proposal in the GOP platform is the call for a lower corporate tax rate. For one, the platform rests on the mistaken assumption that “American businesses now face the world’s highest corporate tax rate.” While it may be true that the US has the highest statutory rate on paper, the actual amount of taxes paid by US corporations is nowhere near the statutory rate because of the large swath of corporate tax breaks and loopholes that allow many enormously profitable companies, like General Electric and Verizon, to pay nothing at all in taxes.
Comparatively, the amount of corporate taxes paid as a percentage of GDP in the US is the second lowest in the developed world. In fact, a recent CTJ analysis found that two-thirds of the largest US multinational corporations with significant foreign profits paid a lower corporate tax rate on their US profits than the rate they paid to foreign governments on their foreign profits.
Rather than dealing with the breaks and loopholes that plague our corporate tax system, the GOP platform advocates expanding them, most notably by moving the US to a territorial tax system under which corporations would have a greater incentive to move profits and jobs offshore (a problem that can be solved by ending deferral).
The new Republican platform identifies high rates as the core problem with our current tax system, but the real problem is decades of cuts and proliferating breaks and loopholes are making it impossible over the long term for the government to provide critical services without dangerously increasing the national debt.