President Trump repeatedly says that "America is the highest-taxed country in the world." This is an alternative fact. We pay less in taxes, and our government spends less, as a share of our total wealth, than our counterparts in Western Europe and East Asia. But Trump is right when it comes to corporate tax rates; the U.S. corporate income tax right is among the highest in the world.

The Value-Added Tax, a sales tax that applies at every level of business transactions, is an easy tax for governments to collect, and a hard tax to evade.

Starting in the '80s or so, after the United States sharply cut its rates, other countries decided they better do it too, and here's how you do it: you just wipe out the exemptions, the deductions, the credits, the depreciation allowances. And people complain, "Oh my God, it's terrible," but you give them much lower rates and you give them an easier form to file, and people accept that tradeoff.

Relative to the world's other advance democracies, Americans get off easy on tax day. Of the 35 richest countries, the U.S. ranks 32nd in total tax burden.

In the United States, unlike any other advanced democracy, money really talks. Our Supreme Court has said that spending money on politicians is a form of free speech. No other court has said that.

Corporations use all sorts of complex stratagems to move their profits overseas, and thus escape the U.S. income tax.

If you get rid of all these giveaways and loopholes and deductions and credits, then you can sharply lower the rates.