WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump falsely claimed on Wednesday morning that the United States has the highest taxes of any country.
“We are the highest taxed nation in the world,” Trump said in a tweet previewing a speech the president plans to deliver later on Wednesday in North Dakota to promote the Republican tax reform agenda.
Trump has made this claim many times before, and as fact-checkers have repeatedly noted, it is not true. While the U.S. may have the highest nominal tax rate for corporations, American businesses pay a lower effective rate, and taxes in the U.S. are generally lower than in most other countries.
According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as a percentage of the economy U.S. tax revenue ranked near the bottom among economically advanced countries in 2015, with a rate of 26.4 percent. The OECD average was 34.3 percent.
If Trump cared, he could have correctly claimed that the U.S. has the highest statutory corporate tax rate in the world of nearly 40 percent, but even that claim can be a bit misleading since the effective rate is much lower. American corporations wind up paying more like 27 percent, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Congressional Republicans have been laying the groundwork for tax reform this fall, with one of their chief goals being the reduction of corporate tax rates. It’s not clear if they’ll have any more success than they did with repealing Obamacare, an effort that collapsed in a heap over the summer.