Another way to tell the story is by looking at average effective tax rates.
At the same time, U.S.-based multinationals have lots of ways to drive down their effective tax rates.
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Thankfully, the Tax Policy Center has adjusted its effective tax rates for 2013 under the new Obama-Boehner tax law.
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In 2009, Maryland-based financial consulting firm Quantria Strategies did a study on effective tax rates on companies for the Small Business Administration.
The top 0.1 percent would face effective tax rates about 7 percentage points higher in Obama-land (39.7 percent v. 32.8 percent) than on Planet Bush.
Taxpayers and entrepreneurs still have the freedom to lower effective tax rates by moving to one of the nine states that do not tax personal income.
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Effective tax rates can also be affective for analyzing corporate taxes because the statutory rate does not reflect who ultimately bears the burden of the tax.
It is rather twofold: the effective tax rates paid by recipients of US corporate dividends will be higher than those paid on other forms of income.
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The foreign affiliates of U.S. companies reduce their effective tax rates by reporting more of their aggregate net income in the Netherlands (13%), Luxembourg (8%), and Bermuda (8%).
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According to first-quarter 2011 quarterly reports, effective tax rates among the giants varied from 53 percent at General Electric ( GE) to 13 percent at Microsoft ( MSFT).
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The past thirty years has been a continuous deregulation of our economy and effective tax rates as a low as they have been since before World War Two.
"Reports of lower effective tax rates appear to arrive at their figures by running together the profits earned by group companies in Ireland and in other jurisdictions, " Kenny said.
That plan would allow Republicans to say they did not back down in their opposition to raising marginal tax rates and Democrats to say they prevailed by increasing effective tax rates on the rich.
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Thirteen of the 17 countries with enough observations to compute annual effective tax rates in both 2009 and 1999 experienced a reduction in their tax rate with a median decline of 5 percentage points.
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The tax cuts he wants in exchange hinge on a sharp reduction in the effective tax rates paid by Japanese corporations, along with cuts in the inheritance, gift and property taxes that combine to distort the property market.
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As you might expect, giant companies generally pay lower effective tax rates (income before taxes divided by taxes paid) than smaller companies, although both groups are subject to the same statutory corporate tax rate that tops out at 37 percent.
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America's drug industry also enjoys one of the lowest effective tax rates of any industry because of the extraordinary concessions made in order to persuade companies to develop drugs that might not be profitable through the orphan drug tax credit, for example.
Certainly, trillion plus dollar annual deficits, the extension of the Bush tax cuts through 2012, and public disclosure of personal tax information (highlighting low effective tax rates) by Warren Buffett last year and Mitt Romney this year has made public an issue usually limited to discussion among tax academics.
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Our effective tax rates were lower than the U.S. federal statutory rate primarily due to earnings taxed at lower rates in foreign jurisdictions resulting from producing and distributing our products and services through our foreign regional operations centers in Ireland, Singapore, and Puerto Rico, which have lower income tax rates.
For people with very high incomes, the rise in marginal tax rates would be smaller, but to the extent that itemized deductions rise with income, the loss of those itemized deductions means that the cut in marginal effective tax rates on high income people will be less than the cut in statutory rates.
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On the positive side, it would seem that, thanks to the often substantial increase in the basic allowance and the reduction or removal of exemptions, fears that the flat tax reforms would greatly reduce personal-income tax progressivity the notion according to which economic agents should pay higher effective tax rates the more they earn have been overblown.
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People trying to raise themselves out of poverty by earning more can face effective marginal tax rates (including phase-outs of various government programs) that exceed 100%.
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As shown in the chart below, effective Federal tax rates for low earners have dropped to zero over the last decade, even after including FICA taxes.
The big gap between the headline and effective marginal tax rates reflects the large number of allowances given to firms for doing particular activities, such as research and development.
In 2013, with the Bush tax cuts expiring, and the Obamacare tax increases becoming fully effective, the top tax rates of virtually every major federal tax are already scheduled under current law to increase sharply.
Here, for 2008 (as reported by the IRS and calculated by Forbes) are the average effective individual income tax rates, as a percentage of adjusted gross income, for various income groups.
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Furthermore, in 1986, the U.S. had one of the lowest effective marginal corporate tax rates for equity-financed investments in machinery and industrial structures in the U.S., and now we have one of the highest.
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And its complexity is regressive, since only the rich can afford the best tax attorneys to reduce their effective rates.
High tax rates are not an effective way to redistribute income.
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The foundation of the fiscal cliff is the increase in the top tax rates of virtually every major federal tax already scheduled in current law to become effective on January 1.
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