President Donald Trump repeated on Tuesday, during a meeting with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, that the U.S. is the highest taxed nation in the world. It isn't. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo Trump won’t give up this false tax claim The U.S. is not the highest taxed nation in the world — but some Republicans are finding it hard to buck the president's favorite talking point.

"We are the highest taxed nation in the world,” President Donald Trump has repeated over and over again.

He said it Tuesday during a meeting with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He said it at a White House event last Friday. He's tweeted it, repeated it in television interviews and declared it at countless rallies. It is his go-to talking point, his favorite line as he tries to lead the Republican Party to a once-in-a-generation overhaul of the federal tax code.


It is also false — something fact checkers have been pointing out since 2015, when Trump first began declaring it on the campaign trail.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sought for the second time in less than a week to defend the comment by saying, in effect, that Trump did not mean what he said.

“We are the highest taxed corporate tax [sic] in the developed economy. That’s a fact,” Sanders said when pressed on the comment during a briefing.

“But that’s not what the president said,” a reporter retorted.

“That’s what he’s talking about,” Sanders responded. “We are the highest taxed corporate nation.”

“But that’s not what he said. He said we’re the highest taxed nation in the world,” said the reporter, Trey Yingst of One America News Network.

“The highest taxed corporate nation. Seems pretty consistent to me. Sorry, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree,” Sanders said, moving on.

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Republicans on the Hill offer what is essentially the same defense: The president means it in a way that is not false. The U.S. does have the highest corporate tax rate in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, though many corporations do not pay at the full statutory rate.

Regardless, Trump’s statement has not been that the corporate rate is the highest. What he repeatedly says is: “We are the highest taxed nation in the world.”

Fact checkers and tax experts from across the political spectrum have repeatedly noted that the statement is false. Taxes represent about 26 percent of GDP in the United States. That’s well below the 34 percent average in the OECD — and far below countries like Denmark, France and Italy, where taxes are more than 40 percent of GDP.

But Trump has stuck to the talking point. And, as the White House showed on Tuesday, it will continue to defend the remark.

“It’s wrong. It’s simply wrong. We are among the lowest taxed nations in the OECD,” said Michael J. Graetz, a professor of tax law at Columbia Law School and a former senior official in the Treasury Department under President George H.W. Bush.

“Whenever I see that, I’m like ‘Oh, here we go again,’” said Kyle Pomerleau, the director of federal projects at the right-leaning Tax Foundation. “Because we’ve done this fact check for like two years, and the answer remains the same: The United States is not the highest taxed nation in the world.”

“The correct statement is that the U.S. has the highest statutory corporate income tax rate in the developed world,” said Joe Rosenberg, senior research associate at the Tax Policy Center, which describes itself as nonpartisan.

For Republicans eager for a legislative win, some appear to see little upside to calling out the president.

“Trump is saying something that Washington has ignored for too long — American businesses are the highest taxed in the developed world,” said Alex Hendrie, the director of tax policy at Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist’s right-wing group, which calls for major tax cuts. “While our competitors have lowered the rates in past years and decades, the tax rate for U.S. businesses has stayed the same for three decades.”

But other tax reform advocates see danger in repeating the same falsehood.

“I think it’s designed to rile people up,” Graetz said, adding that the line will leave people feeling as though they are bearing a higher tax burden than they actually are. He does advocate a lower corporate tax rate, he said.

“It confuses the argument for tax reform,” Pomerleau said. “The structure of the tax code is broken, and you can go down a long list of reasons that’s the case.”

Being the highest-taxed nation in the world, however, is not one of them. And making that the focus tends to drive the conversation toward a tax cut, rather than the kind of revenue-neutral structural tax reform that many on both sides of the aisle could get behind.

Sanders offered a less robust defense of the statement when pressed Friday.

“I believe there are specific sectors within the country that are among the highest-taxed in the world, and we’ll be happy to provide that data to you,” she said during the briefing.

She later emailed POLITICO: “The United States has the highest corporate tax rate among developed economies. That actually hits all sectors.”

Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University, called Trump’s line “a flat-out lie.” The vocal defense of the comment is revealing, he said.

“It tells you there’s a fear factor within the GOP to contradict anything Trump says,” he said. “Every single congressperson knows what Trump said is false.”

Rachael Bade contributed to this report.