Mark Victor Hansen, the co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, once said, “The best way to help the poor is to not be one of them.” In the United States, thirty-seven million people lived below the poverty line in 2004. Edward Wolff, a professor of Economics at New York University, predicts that the top 5 percent wealthiest own more than half of all wealth, and in 1998, they owned 59 percent of all wealth, “wealth is the stuff that people own”. One way to close this gap between the “rich” and the “poor” is through the United States tax system, specifically the corporate tax system. By lowering the taxes that are levied upon small and large businesses, businesses will sell their goods for less, be more flexible, and most importantly expand and grow.

Like the “personal income tax, taxes on corporations in the United States were a temporary emergency levy enacted during the Civil War. Corporate income taxation was ªrst adopted on a permanent basis in 1909. As with the personal income tax, its support arose from opposition to the prevailing taxes of the day and a belief that its burden would fall disproportionately on the wealthy. Unlike the personal tax, however, the corporate tax was able to escape constitutional problems, as Congress packaged it as an ‘excise’ tax. 10 Federal corporate income tax revenues followed a pattern similar to that of the personal income tax up through World War II.” The United States has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world, second only to Japan, with a 40 percent tax rate. America's corporate tax rate is higher than the rate in every European nation--even socialist welfare states like France and Sweden. The individual corporate tax rates are the following:

Corporate Income Tax Rates--2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2000
Taxable income over Not over Tax rate
$0 $50,000 15%
50,000 75,000 25%
75,000 100,000 34%
100,000 335,000 39%