USA Today Editorial Calls for Lower Corporate Taxes

Liberal media outlets often champion higher taxes, or at the very least lash out at businesses for finding ways to lower their tax bills. However, USA Today offered an editorial on Aug. 14, doing the very opposite: calling for lower corporate taxes. 

In the “our view” section of the paper’s opinion page, USA Today’s editorial declared “To deter ‘inversions,’ overhaul corporate taxes.” 

Inversions are a tactic where companies move their corporate residence to countries with lower tax rates, including locations in Europe, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, in order to avoid high U.S. corporate taxes – the highest among industrialized nations. This results in less overall tax revenue from corporations, while the businesses themselves can still conduct most of their operations in America. 

“On one hand, who can blame them?” the editorial asked. “The U.S. rate is the highest in the developed world, and it’s legal to keep the company headquarters and most of the business in the USA but move the corporate address abroad by jumping through some regulatory hoops.” 

Although USA Today did call inversions “ugly,” it proposed that the government make it attractive for companies to stay in the U.S. by lowering the corporate tax rate and “making up the revenue loss by closing loopholes” or by “raising taxes on dividends.”

The editorial pointed out that the U.S. corporate tax rate is the “highest in the developed world” at 39.1 percent. 

“This should be yet another wake-up call for Congress that its’ past time to overhaul the expensive and maddeningly complicated U.S. tax code, both for individuals and corporations,” USA Today’s editorial board concluded.

An op-ed in the opposing view section on the same page called for higher taxes on corporations.

While President Obama has criticized companies who use inversions, many of his biggest donors profit off of this system, according to reports from Bloomberg News and CBS News.