Chart of the Day: Corporate Taxation in America

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This comes via Felix Salmon, but I edited his chart to create a different one. Roughly speaking, mine shows total corporate income tax paid as a percent of pretax profit, and as you can see, it’s been on a pretty steady downward trend for a long time, from around 50% in 1950 to 20% today. But of course, this is just an aggregate number. As Felix says, “What we don’t know — because they won’t say, and no one’s forcing them to say — is how much any given public company pays.” And you can hardly blame them, since the tax rate for lots of big companies would be so laughably small that no one would ever take them seriously again when they complained about America’s terribly burdensome tax system.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t reform the corporate tax code. We should. Intead of a high basic rate with lots of exemptions, we should have a somewhat lower rate with fewer exemptions. And we probably ought to adopt a territorial system while we’re at it. Or, alternatively, we could just ditch corporate taxation entirely and replace it with something else that has a similar or more progressive incidence.

But whatever we do, don’t ever fall for the complaint that corporate tax rates in the U.S. are high. They aren’t. (See Table 1 here.) American taxes are complex, but they aren’t especially high.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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