Corporate tax rates are a con game

You have to give credit to President Trump and the Republicans for pulling off the greatest con game ever with corporate tax rates. They had a lot of help from Democrats and the news media.

The only thing true is that the maximum corporate rate was 35 percent. However, so many adjustments have been built into the tax code that the average effective rate was only about 19 percent. They changed the maximum rate to 21 percent and left all of the adjustments intact. The future average effective tax rate will be well below 21 percent and some industry groups or sectors (such as mining) will be below 10 percent.

I challenge The Olympian to publish the before and after rates for each specific industry group or sector. These were revealed on the business channels during the past week after it was too late to influence the legislative outcome. Democrats seldom mentioned this reality during long hours of debate. Sen. Cantwell, for example, used her debate time to argue about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

You can fool all of the people all of the time with this type of cooperation. However, we can still provide free health insurance and college tuition for all Americans simply by taxing capital gains at the same percentage rates as earned income. Run for Congress in 2018 and make it happen.

This story was originally published January 10, 2018 at 11:27 AM with the headline "Corporate tax rates are a con game."