To the editor:

In his Aug. 30 column, Charles Krauthammer excretes the old right-wing half-truth about the U.S. corporate tax rate being the highest in the world — which it is on paper, though there are a zillion ways to avoid paying that. Not long ago General Electric paid no corporate tax at all.

Actually only 6 percent of U.S. businesses are corporations in the traditional sense. Since the Reagan era, they have learned how to escape taxation through inversion (moving abroad), master limited partnerships (passing all profits to shareholders, avoiding tax altogether), real estate investment trusts (ditto), or partnerships and S-corporations, which pay no income taxes (one such is the engineering firm Bechtel). This information is all taken from an informative article in the business section of the Aug. 29 New York Times.

It is laughable that Krauthammer’s solution is for Congress and the president to pass a “revenue neutral” revised U.S. tax code at a time when Republicans have been “action neutral” for the last six years, hoping that our president and the Democrats will just go away. Government needs taxes and journalism needs more than half the truth.