Sometimes less is more, even with corporate tax rates. Edward Maydew’s research suggests that if there were fewer opportunities for tax avoidance, the overall corporate tax rate could be lowered and the United States would collect more corporate tax revenue.
While President Obama argued during the campaign that multinationals operating in the United States manage to evade a big chunk of corporate income taxes, U.S.-based multinationals pay neither unusually high taxes nor do they manage, to any great extent, to avoid them, according to a study by professor Doug Shackelford.