Corporate Taxation in the US

Abstract

The US corporation income tax has been the focus of much criticism and debate during the past decade. Many hold it responsible for the low level of business investment in the US, and it has been criticised as a fundamentally unfair and illogical tax because it taxes corporations as independent entities, regardless of the tax brackets of individual shareholders. Much of the academic discussion in the 1970s about reform of the corporate tax centred on the ‘integration’ of corporate and individual income taxes, to make the corporate ‘tax’ essentially a withholding mechanism for the individual income tax.1 More recently, the emphasis has shifted toward ‘reform’ by repeal, with President Reagan’s call for the abolition of the corporate tax typical of this viewpoint.KeywordsDepreciation AllowanceEconomic DepreciationInterest DeductibilityNominal Interest PaymentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.