Every Thursday Foundry editor Conn Carroll reviews the latest stories in the conservative and liberal blogospheres for Bloggingheads.tv‘s “This Week in Blog“. This week the show included a discussion below about taxes including the assertion that the U.S. has the world’s second highest corporate tax rate and that Barack Obama’s new economic adviser Jason Furman, supports lowering the corporate tax rate:

Now fellow “This Week in Blog” contributor Bill Scher has a post up at Campaign for America’s Future arguing that these assertions are “not so.” His evidence? First he quotes an op-ed Furman wrote for Brookings:

The United States has the second highest corporate tax rate of the 30 countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). But because the United States has so many generous special tax preferences for businesses, it collects the fourth lowest corporate tax revenues as a share of GDP among all OECD countries.

Next he cites another Furman op-ed supporting Rep. Charlie Rangle’s (D-NY) tax bill which lowers the corporate tax rate from 35% to 30.5%.

Scher then writes: “So the next time you hear some of these factually flimsy conservative talking points, remember: America has the fourth-lowest effective tax rate. And no one on Obama’s economic team embraces McCain’s tax proposals.”

But no one ever said the U.S. has the world’s highest “effective” corporate tax rate. Thanks to liberals in Congress who want to pass things like “Patriot Employer Act“s it should be no surprise that huge corporations exploit an overly complicated tax code to the detriment of most Americans. And no one ever said Obama’s advisers support John McCain’s tax plan. But Furman, contrary to his new boss Barack Obama, does support lowering the corporate tax rate. And that is still 100% true.