by Ross Pomeroy One of the main planks of President Biden and congressional Democrats’ agenda is making corporations and high-earning Americans “pay their fair share” through higher taxes. But a recently published analysis in the journal SAGE Open delving into sixty years of U.S. economic data from 1960 to 2020 suggests that their proposal, if implemented, could backfire. “In short, as the top corporate rate or top personal rate goes higher, real GDP per capita decreases,” the authors, Ted Peterson, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science, and Zachary Blair, a recent graduate focusing on advanced financial analysis, reported. Peterson and Blair sought to explore how the top corporate and personal tax rates correlated with real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, which shows a country’s economic output per person adjusted for inflation. Though imperfect, the measure is considered a proxy for the economic wellbeing of a country’s citizens. In the United States, the corporate tax rate currently stands at 21%, lowered from 35% in 2017 when President Trump and congressional Republicans passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The top personal tax rate for 2022 is 37% for individual incomes over $539,900 or $647,850 for married couples filing jointly. President…
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