“This wouldn’t just be the wrong time to raise the corporate rate – it would be the worst time”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Former United States Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) today submitted testimony for the record of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee’s hearing on “Funding and Financing Options to Bolster American Infrastructure.”
As Senator Lincoln notes in her testimony, our country’s infrastructure “needs to be repaired and revitalized with the speed this pressing issue demands and the American people deserve.” But the worthy pursuit to build our infrastructure back better, as Senator Lincoln adds, must be done a manner that helps, rather than hamstrings, America’s economic recovery. More specifically, Senator Lincoln cautions her former colleagues on the Committee against raising America’s globally competitive corporate tax rate – “a funding option that would halt domestic investment, ship American jobs overseas, restart inversions, and result in wage reductions.”
Meanwhile, as job creating businesses and the workers they employ strive to recover on the heels of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, “this wouldn’t just be the wrong time to raise the corporate rate – it would be the worst time as corporate taxes, per the OECD, ‘are the most harmful type of tax for economic growth.'” Instead, as Senator Lincoln concludes, “a smart approach to ‘funding and financing options to bolster American infrastructure’ would refrain from raising a competitive corporate tax rate that generated key economic wins prior to the COVID-19 pandemic – and can likewise be relied upon to do so in its aftermath.”
Click here to view Senator Lincoln’s testimony in its entirety.
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BACKGROUND:
- Senator Blanche Lincoln, a former U.S. Senator from Arkansas and RATE Coalition advisor, served on the Senate Finance Committee between 2001 and 2010.
- The RATE Coalition’s members and affiliates employ more than 53 million American workers in all 50 states.
