President Donald Trump keeps insisting that industry is taxed at the highest rate of any industrialized country, in fact almost every country in the whole world.
It isn’t true, but he says it anyway.
So I guess that makes it true.
But our average tax rate for business is 18.5 percent, according to media reports.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports that some companies, given the role that special interests play, pay nothing at all.
If Trump and Congress are successful in dropping the stated rate to 20 percent and leave all those special-interest tax loopholes intact, then the true average rate could be lower than 15 percent.
So I would be happy to “cut” that rate, across the board, to 20 percent if and only if all those “special interests” are excised and we simply tax all businesses the same at 20 percent across the board.
Then maybe we could leave in the deduction for educational interest charges on student loans.
Maybe we could leave in allowing teachers, who buy supplies for students when the school district will not provide them, with the ability to deduct those expenses.
Maybe we can afford to allow people with massive medical bills to deduct those expenses instead of having to file bankruptcy.
Yep, I can get behind that.
Ian Robertson,
Sequim