A group of 42 major corporations have joined together to form a new lobbying coalition to press for corporate tax reform.
The Alliance for Competitive Taxation includes companies such as Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Eli Lilly, FedEx, General Electric, Google, IBM, Intel, PepsiCo and Wal-Mart.
The goal of the new group is comprehensive tax reform that lowers the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and establishes a modern globally competitive tax system that aligns the United States with the rest of the world. “We believe tax reform should simplify the tax code, promote economic growth, and be fully paid for by ending tax breaks and preferences so that not one dime is added to the deficit,” the group said in an announcement Tuesday.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office who is currently president of American Action Forum, and Laura Tyson, the former chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and current professor at the University of California, Berkeley, will serve as economic advisors to the coalition.
“America’s tax system is outdated, overly complicated, gets in the way of creating jobs, and puts American businesses at a competitive disadvantage in the global marketplace,” Holtz-Eakin said in a statement. “High business tax rates and an international system that hurts jobs and discourages investment in the U.S. put our system years behind those of our global competitors. It needs to be fixed.”
“Our top national priority should be growing our economy and creating well-paying jobs,” Tyson said in a statement. “But our current corporate tax system is standing in the way. We need comprehensive revenue-neutral corporate tax reform to boost investment, productivity, and job creation in the U.S. and to strengthen the competitiveness of U.S. businesses in the global economy.”
Some of the corporations in the coalition have been members of the earlier RATE Coalition, which also advocated for lowering the statutory corporate tax rate.
Many of the companies pay much lower effective tax rates in the U.S. and other parts of the world. Some, such as Google and GE, have been accused of using low-tax countries as tax havens by shifting their profits and intellectual property to them.
