March 25, 2018
The Washington Post might have confused some readers in a piece on how many highly paid professionals are looking to form new S corporations to game the new tax law. Most people who own S corporations will get a 20 percent tax savings on the income they get from these corporations.
At one point the piece told readers:
“Millions of American businesses pay taxes through the individual tax code, known in tax parlance as ‘pass-through’ businesses. [These are S corporations.] They’ve historically done that so they could pay taxes below the 35 percent corporate tax rate, which was reduced to 21 percent in the December tax law.”
This is incorrect. If the businesses were chartered as normal corporations, they would pay the 35 percent corporate tax rate. Then the money paid out to their owner or owners as dividends or as realized capital gains would be taxed as individual income, with a top rate of 20 percent.
Until the change in the tax law, many owners of S corporations were in the top 39.6 percent bracket, so they actually faced a tax rate on their income from S corporations that was higher than the 35 percent corporate tax rate. The advantage of the S-corporation was that it allowed the owners of corporations to escape the corporate income tax, not the lower tax rate.
The separate corporate tax rate was justified by the fact that the government gives corporations special benefits, most importantly limited liability. It was always a voluntary tax in the sense that anyone who did not feel the benefits of corporate status were worth the tax could just form a partnership instead of a corporation. However, the tax law has been changed over the years so that people can now form an S-corporation to get the benefits of corporate status, without having to pay the corporate income tax.
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