Kevin Hassett Spanks the Tax Policy Center
For me, Hassett’s biggest contribution to the tax debate is the notion that high corporate tax rates depress the wages of workers.
.. Because companies have stashed profits overseas, and because the U.S. tax cost of investment is so high, middle-income wage earners have suffered mightily. Hassett — and his AEI colleague Aparna Mathur — have argued for over a decade that if you want to raise wages, cut corporate tax rates.
.. “for the median household in the U.S., the top corporate marginal rate cut from 35 percent to 20 percent would boost wage growth almost four-fold.”
.. Hassett has argued that 70 percent of the benefits of lower business tax rates accrue to middle-income wage earners — in other words, Donald Trump’s middle-class base.
.. former CEA chair Glenn Hubbard recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that too many economists fail to consider the share of the U.S. corporate tax burden borne by labor — 60 percent according to his research
.. concluded that it would boost wages by 8 percent.
.. It’s the difference between a prospering and optimistic middle class and a pessimistic middle class that lives day-to-day, paycheck-to-paycheck.
.. Trump’s tax-cut and regulatory-rollback policies are aimed directly at ending the war on business, which has dragged down the economy for nearly two decades. Let’s reward success rather than punish it.