All Rankings Are Relative

Virginia's business climate is ranked first. West Virginia's is ranked last.

But only compared to each other. Add the rest of the global business community, and both suck:

We're Number One, Alas
The Wall Street Journal

Some good news on the tax cutting front: Last week lawmakers approved an 8.9 percentage point reduction in the corporate income tax rate. Too bad the tax cutters are Germans, not Americans.

There's a trend here. At least 25 developed nations have adopted Reaganite corporate income tax rate cuts since 2001. The U.S. is conspicuously not one of them. Vietnam has recently announced it is cutting its corporate rate to 25% from 28%. Singapore has approved a corporate tax cut to 18% from 20% to compete with low-tax Hong Kong's rate of 17.5%, and Northern Ireland is making a bid to slash its corporate tax rate to 12.5% to keep pace with the same low rate in the prosperous Republic of Ireland. Even in France, of all places, new President Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed reducing the corporate tax rate to 25% from 34.4%.

What do politicians in these countries understand that the U.S. Congress doesn't? Perhaps they've read "International Competitiveness for Dummies." In each of the countries that have cut corporate tax rates this year, the motivation has been the same -- to boost the nation's attractiveness as a location for international investment. Germany's overall rate will fall to 29.8% by 2008 from 38.7%. Remarkably, at the start of this decade Germany's corporate tax rate was 52%.

All of which means that the U.S. now has the unflattering distinction of having the developed world's highest corporate tax rate of 39.3% (35% federal plus a state average of 4.3%), according to the Tax Foundation. (link)

Those of you who think America's corprorations are the root of all evil will take delight in knowing that the USA has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, including all those socialist countries of Olde Europe. Your efforts have paid off. Hope you like those Chinese shoes you're wearing, by the way.

As for the more mature among you, that statement of fact - "the U.S. now has the unflattering distinction of having the developed world's highest corporate tax rate" - should frighten the Honduran socks off of you.

And the Democrats are in charge. It's only going to get worse.

May God have mercy.