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an excerpt from an article about corporate taxes:

"The U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Only Brazil, Uzbekistan, Chad and Argentina have higher corporate tax rates than the U.S. According to a research study by the Cato Institute, the effective U.S. corporate tax on new investment was 34.6% in 2010. This was higher than the average OECD rate of 18.6% and the average rate for 83 countries at 17.7%.

So, if the corporate rate is 34.6%, what's with the claims that companies don't pay taxes, or at least don't pay enough? In some cases it's deliberate lying, but in others it's just an exaggeration based on a failure to understand how taxes work for corporations. PriceWaterhouseCoopers prepared a study from 2006 through 2009 examining Global Effective Tax Rates, which provides some insights. By the way, an 'effective tax rate' is what a company really pays, not the rate assigned by a government. The effective rate can be lower, or higher, than the official rate declared by the government. The PWC study discovered that US-based companies operating globally pay more than eight percentage points more in ETR than companies operating globally with a headquarters outside the US. Consequently, this demonstrates not only that corporations pay a higher effective tax rate than individuals in the United States, the rates charged by the U.S. government are among the highest in the world, and US-based companies are penalized for putting their head office here.