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Billionaire investor Warren Buffett says that it's a "myth" that high taxes are "strangling" U.S. corporations.

In a Monday op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum called for the corporate tax rate to be halved from 35 percent to 17.5 percent to "[r]estore America's competitiveness."

CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Buffet what he thought the highest rate should be.

"What the rate should be are rates that bring in about 18.5 or so percent of GDP [gross domestic product] as revenue," the Oracle of Omaha explained. "The interesting thing about the corporate rate is that corporate profits, as a percentage of GDP last year were the highest or just about the highest in the last 50 years. They were 10 and a fraction percent of GDP. That’s higher than we’ve seen in 50 years."

He continued: "The corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP were 1.2 percent, $180 billion. That’s just about the lowest we’ve seen. So our corporate tax rate last year, effectively, in terms of taxes paid for the United States, was around 12 percent, which is well below those existing in most of the industrialized countries around the world."

"So it is a myth that American corporations are paying 35 percent or anything like it. Incidentally, 1.2 percent of GDP or 12 or so percent of corporate profits actually paid, that is a rate far, far, far below what we've seen in the United States. ... Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness."

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that corporations in the U.S. paid only an average of 12.1 percent in taxes on the profits they earned inside the U.S in fiscal 2011, according to statistics from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

It’s the lowest percentage corporations have paid on those profits since at least 1972, and it’s less than half of the 25.6 percent they paid on average between 1987 and 2008.

Corporations saw their profits, however, reach an all-time high at the end of 2010. The $1.68 trillion in annualized profits in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 beat the previous record of $1.65 trillion in the third quarter of 2006.

(H/T: Think Progress)

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Many Americans were shocked last month to learn that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney only paid an effective tax rate of 13.8 percent in 2010, but a recent report shows that corporations are paying even less.

Corporations in the U.S. paid only an average of 12.1 percent in taxes on the profits they earned inside the U.S in fiscal 2011, according to statistics from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

The Wall Street Journal reports that it's the lowest percentage corporations have paid on those profits since at least 1972, and it's less than half of the 25.6 percent they paid on average between 1987 and 2008.

Corporations saw their profits, however, reach an all-time high at the end of 2010. The $1.68 trillion in annualized profits in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010 beat the previous record of $1.65 trillion in the third quarter of 2006.

The Journal credited the low rate to a temporary tax break, known as "bonus depreciation," which allowed companies to immediately write off certain investments instead of taking write-offs over a period of years.

In an interview with NBC earlier this year, Romney flat-out stated that President Barack Obama had raised taxes on corporations.

"If you want to get the economy going, lower corporate tax rates," he said. "He’s raised them."

Since 1993, the marginal corporate rate has been at 35 percent. Romney has proposed that it be reduced to 25 percent.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has said the he would "create a boom of new American entrepreneurship by dramatically cutting the corporate tax rate" to 12.5 percent (PDF), one of the lowest in the developed world.

During his State of the Union Address last month, the president also opened the door to lowering the corporate rate "without adding to our deficit." In their 2010 report (PDF), the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board discussed lowering the marginal rate to 28 percent.

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Here we go again with another Republican telling us we need to make the income disparity in the United States worse. Right now I'm thinking the least amount of damage that so-called "super committee" could do right now is just to remain deadlocked.

And who wants to bet the people Kay Bailey Hutchison is talking here who currently aren't paying any taxes are the poor and the elderly? And naturally the one reason she really wants to see that committee come to an agreement is because heaven forbid we can't reduce our military spending.

Transcript via CNN.

CROWLEY: OK. Let me turn you to somewhat politics as usual up on Capitol Hill, where we have 33 senators who have written the super committee and said, listen, rewrite the tax code with no net tax increase. Does that letter not doom the super committee to failure given what the Democrats want and this is supposed to be a compromise?

HUTCHISON: No, I don't think it dooms it to failure. I think if we are going to realistically get our budget house in order, we've got to cut spending, we have to have a fairer tax code, one in which it is lower and promotes growth in business, but does catch people who aren't paying taxes right now who should be paying taxes.

You get revenue increase by increasing the growth in our business sector, our private sector. You increase growth in the private sector and you'll get new revenue, because people will be working and paying taxes rather than having to be on unemployment.

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Lawrence O'Donnell was, to put it mildly, not impressed with Mitt Romney's speech he gave this Tuesday and his, as O'Donnell put it, science fiction imaginings, of a "job machine." O'Donnell didn't pull any punches as to why Romney claiming that he would get his so-called ideas for job creation passed on "day one" was an absolutely ridiculous assertion, since he's not going to get anything passed without the help of the Congress, who's not going to be voting on anything the first day he's in office if he was to be elected our next president.

And as he noted, Romney's big idea for job creation in the United States that he gave just ahead of President Obama's speech on the same matter, is of course just more of the same and more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations who don't need them.

O'Donnell followed up on his analysis of Romney with Robert Reich who blasted Romney's assertion that more tax cuts are needed for corporations who are already sitting on hordes of cash and who are making money by cutting U.S. payrolls and sending jobs overseas, and that rewarding companies for that sort of behavior is not exactly anyone's definition of a “job machine" for the United States,

They also discussed Romney's proposal to give corporations a tax break for repatriation of their income and the fact that the last time the United States did this, corporations didn't use that money to create any jobs in the United States and that if we do it again and reward them for hiding their money overseas, it just encourages more of the same bad behavior.

As Reich pointed out, the rest of us, real people, are actually expected to pay our taxes and are not given any breaks and heaven forbid if you give anyone on welfare or unemployment insurance any help, you're encouraging bad behavior by those individuals and they'll take it and won't work and will be irresponsible in GOP world. As he noted, Republicans while attacking average citizens for taking so-called handouts, are more than willing to trust corporations if they're given some corporate welfare instead. Lord knows they've got to have their priorities in place with who they're looking out for.

As I wrote about last month, Matt Taibbi went on Olbermann's show and pointed out why allowing corporations to have that corporate tax holiday is a really bad idea as well, and credit to O'Donnell and Reich, they hit on a good deal of the same points Taibbi made in his article at Rolling Stone during this segment.

Reich's interview with O'Donnell below the fold.

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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a voter in New Hampshire Monday that the way to make sure companies like General Electric pay more taxes is to lower their tax rate.

"How are you going to tackle those values issues and the abuse that's happening in Washington?" a voter attending a pancake breakfast in New Hampshire asked Romney. "For instance, why doesn't GE pay taxes?"

"You're going to see me talking about changing the corporate tax structure," Romney replied. "Our rates are the highest in the world and that means companies are inclined to go elsewhere. And I can't speak for GE in specifics, but my guess is they've gone elsewhere over the years to places where taxes are lower and regulations are lower, where they think they are going to get a better deal."

"We have a strange thing in America. I'm puzzled by it. If a company makes a bunch of money. Let's say, selling goods in China and they keep their money in China and invest in China, they don't pay U.S. taxes. But if they bring their money home to invest here, we charge them taxes. It's absolutely backwards."

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Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said Sunday that she was "open" to implementing Sarah Palin's suggestion that all corporate income taxes be abolished.

"I propose to eliminate all federal corporate income tax," Palin had said in a speech to the tea party in Iowa Saturday. "This is how we create millions of high-paying jobs... To eliminate any loss of federal revenues from this tax cut, we eliminate corporate welfare and all the loopholes, and we eliminate all the bailouts."

"We could go that route," Bachmann told CBS' Bob Schieffer Sunday. "If we went that route then we'd have to have a fundamental restructuring of the tax code. I'm open to having that debate... What we do know is that the current corporate tax rate is killing job creation."

"So you could see a way to do that?" Schieffer pressed.

"It would be possible if we have a fundamental restructuring of the tax code," Bachmann insisted. "But immediately what we could do is repatriation of bringing this money in from American companies that are earning the money overseas. But second, I do believe that the president at minimum should lower the corporate tax rate to 20 percent so that businesses can see that they will have a more competitive rate. We certainly could get down to a 0 percent corporate tax rate but it would mean a fundamental restructuring of the tax code."

Later on CBS, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman suggested that Palin's idea just wasn't realistic.

"That's a great political bromide," he said.

"How do you do it? How do you make the numbers work? All I'm telling you is I have been there and I have done that... I know how difficult it is to make the numbers work. You have got to find the revenue somewhere that you can reinvest back in the tax code to bring down the rate for everybody."

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I think Bernie Sanders is one of the last people in the United States Senate that I can stand to listen to these days with all of this kabuki theater going on over raising the debt ceiling and the demands for deficit reduction on the backs of the working class and the poor along with Republicans drawing a line in the sand with their public refusals to raise taxes.

Ed Schultz asked Bernie about former President Bill Clinton tossing the idea about lowering the corporate tax rates in America in exchange for closing some loopholes, which Sanders shot down. We all know how that would turn out after watching how the Republicans are negotiating in bad faith on the budget right now. They'd get Democrats to agree that the tax rates should be lowered and then stomp off when they tried to get them to agree to which loopholes to close. That or the only ones they'd go after are those that affect the middle class and not the rich.

Bernie's still out there asking people to sign his petition, which now has well over 100,000 signatures. If you haven't signed yet, you can do so here.

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Holy cow, Bill Kristol actually said something two weeks in a row on Fox News Sunday that I agree with -- we don't need to be lowering the corporate tax rates when these companies are sitting on hoards of cash already and are not hiring.

BREAM: Well, if they have such a hard time doing things like getting the continuing resolution, getting a budget done, getting this debt ceiling done, I mean, who thinks they have the appetite for actually tackling the tax code?

EASTON: Actually, as James Baker said to me not long ago, doing that is actually -- you have gives on both sides, because Democrats get to close loopholes and Republicans get a lowering (ph) of the corporate tax rate. So it actually is -- there is a --

(CROSSTALK)

KRISTOL: I'm the only, like, conservative Republican in the country that actually does not think lowering the corporate tax rate is really the key to America's future.

BREAM: You're the one.

KRISTOL: Corporations have trillions of dollars. If the corporate tax rate is such a burden, how come they have all this money? They're not hiring.

The tax rates on labor are much more onerous, in my view, than the tax rates on corporations. But in any case, this is a heterodox view among conservatives. But nonetheless, this is why this deal can't happen in a year.

I mean, there's a lot of debates that have to happen among Republicans. I think Michele Bachmann probably has a slightly different view of our tax future than Mitt Romney, and this isn't going to happen before November, 2012.

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From C-SPAN's Book TV, Joshua Holland, editor and senior writer at AlterNet discussed his book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy: And Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America.

It's nice to see another liberal manage to make their way into the bastion of right wingnuttery that generally fills the air time of that series at C-SPAN. You can watch the entire segment at C-SPAN's web site here.

In the clip above, Joshua discussed some topics he recently wrote about at AlterNet.

The GOP's Absurd Plan for the Economy: Lowering YOUR Wages:

Earlier this month, House Republicans laid out a perverse plan to lower working Americans' wages, supposedly in a bid to get employers to hire more of them (PDF). One would be hard-pressed to find a better example of the “race to the bottom.”

Republican staffers on the Joint Economic Committee released the study in response to widespread criticism that the deep public sector cuts they've advocated threaten to derail an already anemic “recovery” -- economist Mark Zandi estimated last month that if enacted, the spending cuts would cost the U.S. economy 700,000 jobs through 2012.

So, as Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley wrote in the National Journal, the GOP report “makes the party’s ... case that fiscal consolidation (read: spending cuts) can spur immediate economic growth and reduce unemployment.”

The paper calls for cuts that are “large, credible, and politically difficult to reverse once made,” and offers a typical conservative fantasy about shuttering entire federal agencies. But topping the list of what should be on the Republicans' chopping block is “decreasing the number and compensation of government workers,” which the staffers say will spur job creation because “a smaller government workforce increases the available supply of educated, skilled workers for private firms, thus lowering labor costs.” Read on...

Tax Day Question: Who's Paying What?:

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The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur filling in for Ed Schultz talked to former Labor Secretary under President Clinton Robert Reich about the recent request by U.S. companies for a tax holiday on the over $1 trillion in assets they have sitting offshore.

Dodging Repatriation Tax Lets U.S. Companies Bring Home Multinational Cash:

At the White House on Dec. 15, business executives asked President Obama for a tax holiday that would help them tap more than $1 trillion of offshore earnings, much of it sitting in island tax havens.

The money -- including hundreds of billions in profits that U.S. companies attribute to overseas subsidiaries to avoid taxes -- is supposed to be taxed at up to 35 percent when it’s brought home, or “repatriated.” Executives including John T. Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc. say a tax break would return a flood of cash and boost the economy.

What nobody’s saying publicly is that U.S. multinationals are already finding legal ways to avoid that tax. Over the years, they’ve brought cash home, tax-free, employing strategies with nicknames worthy of 1970s conspiracy thrillers -- including “the Killer B” and “the Deadly D.”

Read on...

Uygur asked Reich what solutions there are when we have one party that is a wholly owned subsidiary of big business as the Republicans are and too many Democrats willing to feed off of the same trough. Reich pointed to the obvious, which is campaign finance reform.

Transcript below the fold.

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