Paul Ryan is a Liar

Update: The NYT link has changed for some reason, so here is the original article duplicated on FrumForum.

Evidence that Paul Ryan is a liar. From the New York Times:

Key Republican Says Companies Can't Bear New Taxes: Wisconsin's Rep. Paul Ryan tells CBS's "The Early Show" that "we are already taxing our job creators and our businesses more than our foreign competitors are taxing theirs."

Not true. The tax analysis group Citizens for Tax Justice published a report at the end of June which shows that the US ranks near the bottom among OECD countries for taxes as a share of GDP. The report also discusses corporate taxes which directly refutes Ryan's claim that "our job creators and our businesses" are taxed more than their foreign counterparts.

U.S. Is One of the Least Taxed Developed Countries: Many corporate leaders have noted that other OECD countries have lowered their corporate tax rates in recent years, but fail to mention that these countries have also closed corporate tax loopholes while the U.S. has expanded them. As a result, the U.S. collects less corporate taxes as a share of GDP than all but one of the 26 OECD countries for which data are available.

Arguments may vary when you look at the tax rates versus taxes as a share of GDP, but I think the extreme position of the US in the ranking is persuasive. Interestingly, it seems that Bill Clinton also supports a corporate tax cut.

Bill Clinton calls for corporate tax cut: President Bill Clinton says the nation’s corporate tax rate is “uncompetitive” and called for a lower rate as part of a “mega-deal” to raise the debt ceiling. 

“When I was president, we raised the corporate income-tax rates on corporations that made over $10 million [a year],” the former president told the Aspen Ideas Festival on Saturday evening.

“It made sense when I did it. It doesn’t make sense anymore — we’ve got an uncompetitive rate. We tax at 35 percent of income, although we only take about 23 percent. So we should cut the rate to 25 percent, or whatever’s competitive, and eliminate a lot of the deductions so that we still get a fair amount, and there’s not so much variance in what the corporations pay. But how can they do that by Aug. 2?”

Clinton is arguing that the conditions now are different from when he raised them during his administration. However, he also proposes eliminating the deductions that are creating the loopholes which, as the CTJ report argues, are keeping down corporate taxes as a share of GDP. Does Ryan propose that?