Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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A front page article on President Obama’s plan to cut the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent, with offsetting eliminations of loopholes told readers in the second paragraph:
“Obama released a long-awaited plan to overhaul the nation’s corporate tax code that plays directly to his base.” [This line only appeared in the article that appears on-line as the print edition.] The bulk of Democrats have not been clamoring for a cut in the corporate tax rate, although many people in corporations have.
Later in the piece the article tells readers that the plan should increase corporate tax revenue by $250 billion over the course of the decade. Since most readers do not know how much the baseline shows for tax revenue over this period, this number does not provide any real information.
The current projections from the Congressional Budget Office show the government collecting $4,360 billion in corporate taxes over the decade. This means that the proposed increase would raise projected revenue by less than 6 percent.