Corporate Tax Cuts: Canada’s Experience

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are proposing to cut the corporate tax rate. With any tax cut, members of Congress want to know how much revenue the government may lose from the reform. I do not think that cutting our 35 percent federal corporate tax rate to 20 percent or so would lose the government any money over the long term. U.S. and foreign corporations would invest more in the United States, which would boost our economy, and corporations would avoid and evade taxes less.

Canada provides us with a real-world trial run of corporate tax cuts, and new budget data includes the latest revenue estimates. The nation slashed its federal corporate tax rate from 38 percent in the mid-1980s, to 29 percent by 2000, to 15 percent by 2012, as shown in Chart 1 below. Has the government lost revenue?

You be the judge. Chart 2 shows that corporate tax revenues in Canada have fluctuated with the ups and downs in the economy—revenues fell, for example, during recessions in the early 1990s and 2009. But even with the modest Canadian economic growth of recent years, revenues have held up under a much lower rate. Corporate tax revenues are 2.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) today, which is a bit higher than in the mid-1980s when the rate was more than twice as high.

Let’s compare to the United States. While Canada’s 15 percent federal corporate tax will raise 2.1 percent of GDP this year, the 35 percent U.S. federal corporate tax will raise just 1.7 percent. Thus, the Canadian corporate tax raises relatively more than the U.S. tax—even though the rate is less than half the U.S rate.

Canada historic tax revenues here. New Canadian budget data here.