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Research report

Major Surgery Needed: A Call for Structural Reform of the US Corporate Income Tax

  • Alan Viard
Eric Toder, Alan Viard
April 3, 2014
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Abstract

A corporate income tax can play a useful role by preventing shareholders from deferring tax on retained corporate profits. The current U.S. corporate income tax is deeply flawed, however, because it relies on definitions of corporate residence and income sourcing that corporations can easily manipulate, causing economic distortions and erosion of the corporate tax base. Two structural reform options to address these problems are securing international agreement on better ways to allocate the corporate tax base among countries and replacing the corporate income tax with full taxation of American shareholders' dividends and accrued capital gains on stock in publicly traded companies.

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Business Taxes Corporate income tax Campaigns, Proposals, and Reforms Fundamental reform proposals
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Meet the Experts

  • Eric Toder
    Institute Fellow and Codirector, Tax Policy Center
  • Alan Viard
    Alan Viard
    Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
Research report

New Evidence on The Effect of The TCJA On the Housing Market

Robert McClelland, Livia Mucciolo, Safia Sayed
March 30, 2022
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