Options for Corporate Capital Cost Recovery: Tax Rates and Depreciation

Abstract

The way the US corporate tax code requires capital expenditures to be depreciated is highly distortionary and raises the cost of capital investments. Depreciation?the process of writing off capital purchases over time?has received attention because it is the largest corporate tax expenditure in the United States. Requiring capital assets to be depreciated lowers the return to capital investments, creates disparate effective tax rates on similar activities, and signals that the tax code is open to special-interest tailoring. The tax code is often manipulated by arbitrarily shortening depreciation timelines through accelerated depreciation or bonus expensing. As a solution to the current inequity and inefficiency of depreciation policies, this paper advocates full expensing. Expensing incentivizes investment by allowing businesses to write off all expenditures in the year they occur, resulting in a zero effective tax rate on equity-financed capital.