Companies Paying Higher Taxes Create More Jobs

But corporations don't care about creating more jobs; they just care about stripping every last dime from the dying carcass of the U.S. economy, then moving on to the next stupid country desperate cutting taxes in hopes of attracting corporate sharks.

Alan Pyke at Think Progress:

Paying high tax rates doesn’t stifle job creation at the country’s biggest, most profitable companies and low tax rates seem to be more correlated with job losses, according to a new report from the Center for Effective Government.

The 30 Fortune 500 companies that paid the highest tax rates from 2008 to 2010 created about 200,000 jobs from 2008 to 2012, the researchers found. By contrast, the 30 companies with the lowest actual tax rates in that time frame shed a collective 51,289 jobs.

The report compared tax data compiled by Citizens for Tax Justice with employment data from corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The tax data include only companies that turned a profit in each of the three years in question. The 30 high-tax companies each paid at least a 33 percent tax rate over the time frame in question, and only eight of them saw a net decrease in employees. In the low-tax grouping, just two of the 30 profitable companies paid any federal taxes, and a full 15 of them cut their payrolls. Many of the companies report their employment data on a global basis, so the jobs figures are not necessarily representative of solely American job creation.

Despite that fuzziness, the report’s findings align with previous research on the linkage between corporate tax rates and economic success. There is no association between lower rates and higher growth. Making corporations pay higher tax rates makes the overall tax code more progressive, which is good for the poor and working-class.