The Washington Post appears unable to discern when the White House is misleading the Post:

President Obama proposed a major overhaul of the nation’s corporate tax code on Wednesday, an election-year gambit that aims to draw a contrast over a key policy issue with the Republicans vying to replace him.

The plan would lower the nation’s corporate tax rate to 28 percent. At the same time, Obama wants to boost overall revenue from corporate taxation by banning numerous deductions and loopholes that save companies tens of billions of dollars a year on their tax bills.

If your tax rate gets lowered but your tax bill nonetheless increases, you didn’t get a tax cut at all. Obama’s proposed corporate tax cut is not a tax cut.

James Pethokoukis spells out the details of the non-tax-cut by beginning:

The current U.S. economic recovery is arguably the worst in modern American history. Incomes are flat, housing is moribund, and the past three years have seen the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression. Yet President Barack Obama—with the backing of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—has the temerity to propose a corporate tax reform plan that would actually raise the tax burden on American business by $250 billion over a decade (and de facto on workers, too) without lowering rates to an internationally competitive level. This is a terrible, terrible plan:

1. The Obama-Geithner plan would lower the statutory corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent, currently the second-highest among advanced economies. But that would still leave the combined U.S. corporate tax rate—state and federal—at 32.2 percent, far above the OECD combined average of 25 percent. The U.S. combined rate would be a bit below slow-growing Japan and France but above the U.K. and Germany. That’s not nearly good enough. …

2. The Obama-Geithner plan would establish, according to the New York Times, a minimum tax on multinational corporations’ foreign earnings to discourage “accounting games to shift profits abroad” or actual relocation of production overseas.

So instead of a carrot, Corporate America gets the stick. Instead of lowering the U.S. rate to a competitive level, Obama would raise the penalty on keeping profits overseas. Indeed, the United States is a huge outlier in that it taxes the foreign profits of multinational companies …

3. To pay for the lower tax rate, Obama would eliminate ”dozens of tax loopholes and subsidies,” according to Politico. But some of the money would be used to “lower the effective rate on manufacturing to no more than 25 percent, while encouraging greater research and development and the production of clean energy,” according to the Times.

First, the effective manufacturing tax rate would be higher than 25 percent once you add back state taxes. Second, the White House is sticking to its clean energy agenda even as other advanced economies like Germany and Spain are abandoning such wasteful subsidies. Again, this is ideology trumping economic reality.

Additional examples of reality the Obama ideology ignores is the pernicious effect corporate income taxes have on economic growth and employee wages, not to mention the fact that corporate taxes, which are incorporated into the cost of business products and services, thereby increase those prices. Note the Tax Foundation chart:

Pethokoukis adds:

Real pro-growth corporate tax policy would eliminate tax breaks, dramatically lower tax rates, and only tax profits earned at home. The Obama plan would actually make the corporate tax code and the U.S. economy less competitive and less productive. But the proposal does neatly fit into the president’s Occupy-inspired campaign theme that wealthy Americans and greedy corporations are to blame for the Great Recession and rising income inequality. Besides, how can Democrats ever raise taxes on the middle-class to pay for all their spending ideas without first socking it to the 1 percent and to business?

Actually, I would revise his first sentence: Real pro-growth corporate tax policy would not tax profits at all, which would eliminate tax breaks and the tax rate debate (not to mention the lobbying thereupon). Whether it’s 35 percent (plus the state’s 7.9 percent rate), 28 percent or the so-called “real rate,” corporate income taxes are 100 percent too high.

Given the completely negative effects of corporate income taxes, it makes you wonder why the Walker administration has done nothing about corporate income taxes. Eliminating state corporate income taxes would mean the state wouldn’t be compounding the federal government’s mistake of having the second highest corporate income tax rates in the developed world on those paying for everything government does.