Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute explores Canada’s recent experience with tweaking the corporate tax rate.
Canada provides us with a real-world trial run of corporate tax cuts, and new budget data includes the latest revenue estimates. The nation slashed its federal corporate tax rate from 38 percent in the mid-1980s, to 29 percent by 2000, to 15 percent by 2012. … Has the government lost revenue?
… [C]orporate tax revenues in Canada have fluctuated with the ups and downs in the economy—revenues fell, for example, during recessions in the early 1990s and 2009. But even with the modest Canadian economic growth of recent years, revenues have held up under a much lower rate. Corporate tax revenues are 2.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) today, which is a bit higher than in the mid-1980s when the rate was more than twice as high.
Let’s compare to the United States. While Canada’s 15 percent federal corporate tax will raise 2.1 percent of GDP this year, the 35 percent U.S. federal corporate tax will raise just 1.7 percent. Thus, the Canadian corporate tax raises relatively more than the U.S. tax—even though the rate is less than half the U.S rate.
