Freedom Line Blog

As 2025 approaches, a critical debate over extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts that finally ended America’s inglorious status as the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate looms.  Important in that debate is something that many people may find surprising:  America’s corporate tax rate remains too high.  As our friends at the Tax Foundation highlight, at 25.8%, it stands above the worldwide average of 23.51%.  Something to keep in mind when opponents of tax reform and greater global competitiveness attempt to mischaracterize our current rate as somehow too low.

U.S. 25.8% Corporate Tax Rate Remains Too High

Among his parade of other outright untruths in his borderline unhinged State of the Union address, last night Joe Biden repeated his economically illiterate claim that “trickle down” tax cuts benefit wealthier Americans at the expense of federal revenues.  Our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity once again provide an invaluable illustration of the falsity of that claim:

From our friends who do such great work at the Tax Foundation, take a look at how tax cuts have led to companies bringing back more cash to the U.S.:

Tax Cuts Spur Repatriation

Here’s what a steady diet of deregulation and tax cuts have done in terms of job creation expectations from even the notoriously wet-blanket Congressional Budget Office:

Deregulation + Tax Cuts = Jobs Boost

A helpful image of the day, comparing private investment during the final two years of the Obama Administration to the immediate aftermath of the November 2016 election, and even more the tax cuts enacted one year later:

It’s almost as if the wave of deregulation and tax cuts had some sort of impact.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), no refuge of supply-side enthusiasts, just boosted its job growth estimate by 2.6 from last year’s estimate:

Deregulation and Tax Cuts: Jet Fuel For Jobs

So after just one year of tax-cutting and deregulation under the Trump Administration, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has revised its estimate of job growth over the next decade upward by over 2.5 million new jobs.  As they say in the legal field, “res ipsa loquitur” – “the fact speaks for itself.”

Upward Job Growth Estimate

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

The entire continent of Europe may seem most useful these days as an object lesson in how not to conduct public finance, but as a fascinating new piece in the UK’s The Spectator makes clear, Sweden provides at least one unlikely exception. While the rest of the world was clamoring for Keynesian stimulus measures in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis, Sweden was following the lead of Anders Borg, its libertarian-leaning Finance Minister. As a result, the country took a drastically different path — one that’s now paying dividends:

While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy — the so-called ‘punk tax cutting’ agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result.

Three years on, it’s pretty clear who was right. ‘Look at Spain, Portugal or the UK, whose governments were arguing for large temporary stimulus,’ he says. ‘Well, we can see that very little of the stimulus went to the economy. But they are stuck with the debt.’ Tax-cutting Sweden, by contrast, had the fastest growth in Europe last year, when it also celebrated the abolition of its deficit. The recovery started just in time for the 2010 Swedish election, in which the Conservatives were re-elected for the first time in history.

The good news: Sweden provides a success story that drives one more nail into Keynesianism’s coffin. The bad news: We’re living in an age where Scandinavia can muster more enthusiasm for free market economics than the U.S.

Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her show “Your Turn.”  Today’s star guest lineup includes:

4:00 p.m. CST/5:00 p.m. EST:    Bruce Herschensohn, Foreign Policy Expert  –  North Korea

4:30 p.m. CST/5:30 p.m. EST:    Pete Sepp, National Taxpayers’ Union (NTU)  –  Bush Tax Cuts, Obama’s Federal Salary Freeze

5:00 p.m. CST/6:00 p.m. EST:    Ashton Ellis, CFIF  –  Wikileaks, Janet Naplitano/Eric Holder/Charles Schumer

5:30 p.m. CST/6:30 p.m. EST:    Steve Milloy, Junkscience.com  –  U.N. Global Warming Conference

Please share your comments, thoughts and questions at (850) 623-1330, or listen via the Internet by clicking here.  You won’t want to miss it today!

Remember how two years ago, Barack Obama was the most exciting, intellectually inventive president since John F. Kennedy? Maybe it’s time for 44 to compare his tax policies to 35: