If you’re paying for a subscription, you really ought to stop now. In an editorial lamenting the “high” US corporate tax rate, the venerable Wall Street Journal published this graph:

That chart is egregious. We learned in high school how to draw best-fit graphs and drawing a line through the furthest outlier doesn’t quite seem to fit the bill. Hell, even Microsoft Excel will draw a better graph than this guy did.

If you want an economist’s debunking of this stupidity, I offer you Mark Thoma’s analysis as well as Kevin Drum’s post, where I originally found this story.

BTW, another serious issue with the graph is that it doesn’t actually take into account corporate tax breaks and exemptions (loopholes) written into the law. In other words, it doesn’t look at the effective tax rate for corporations, which is, obviously, much lower than the WSJ reports.

On top of that, the original research ignores reality. Norway, the very point that turns this into the authors’ version of a Laffer curve, supplements it’s low marginal corporate tax rate with an extra 50% tax (bringing the rate to 78%) on the domestic oil industry, which shares the two properties of being tied to Norway (can’t move to another country) and still highly profitable in the face of such taxes. So, uh, that whole point about lower taxes bringing higher tax revenues is, um, not really applicable to Norway.

The study referenced in the article was released by The American Enterprise Institute which must be a think-tank full of right-wing, poorly educated idiots. How else can you explain releasing this?