According to an online presentation posted at whitehouse.gov, “When corporations invert and pay less in taxes, other working Americans have to pay more to help fund the services we all rely on." This is simply not true, and it is only one of two such misleading statements in the presentation.

The issue arises because the U.S tax system is driving U.S. companies to construct their cross-border mergers in such a way as to invert, that is, to shift their legal domicile overseas. Cross-border mergers are nothing new, of course, but the anti-competitive and overly complex nature of the U.S. tax system is contributing new urgency to some of these mergers.

The headline of the White House presentation says, “You don’t get to pick your tax rate. Neither should corporations.” This is, of course, also not true. You pick your tax rate when you choose whether to live in a high-tax state like New York or a relatively low-tax state like Virginia. Many people pick their tax rates when they choose whether to work more or less, as working more usually means more income which often means a higher statutory tax rate.

In the most extreme example, more and more Americans are inverting themselves – giving up their U.S. citizenship to live in a country with a lower tax rate. According to one report last summer, over 1,000 people renounced their citizenship in the first three months of the year, and nearly 8,000 had done so over the last five years. “The increase is due to current and future changes in tax law and enforcement,” according to a New York attorney cited in the Wall Street Journal story. (Read our previous post on this citizen exodus)

Even corporations which invert don’t actually get to pick their own tax rate. They’re still subject to the full, highest-in-the-industrialized-world U.S. rate on their U.S. income and on all past foreign income. And on their future foreign income they pay the rate applicable in their new domicile.

And what about you paying more tax because a company inverted? Start by checking your own tax forms. There’s not one line indicating how you pay more tax because some company or companies paid less. That’s the first rub – no one pays more tax except as Congress imposes through tax law. To this point, no one in Congress has introduced legislation suggesting any tax hikes on working Americans in response to inversions.

If not individually, or by act of Congress, what about individual taxes going up because some companies flee their U.S. domicile? If shareholders benefit and thereby receive more capital gains and dividend income, then they will owe more tax, and happily so. Most shareholders would appreciate a doubling or quadrupling of their dividend tax bill if the cause was a doubling or quadrupling of their dividend income because the companies they own were doing so much better.

One suspects that this is not what the White House has in mind when it alleges working Americans would have to pay more in tax. So rather than in detail, do individuals in the aggregate pay more tax if corporations pay less? A simple statistical analysis shows this also not to be so. Even allowing for changes in the tax base over time due to economic growth, individual income tax revenues clearly tend to fall when corporate tax burdens fall – the exact opposite of the White House’s assertion.

As the president himself acknowledges, when the U.S. tax code drives U.S.-based corporations to invert, their actions are entirely legal. No one disputes this. And no one disputes these inversions are highly lamentable. And no credible voices dispute that from a policy perspective inversions result from a well-known self-inflicted wound: the anti-competitive U.S. income tax system, about which the administration has very little to say and even less progress to show. If the Obama Administration had put as much effort into comprehensive tax reform as it does this inversion misinformation campaign, we might then see companies flocking to, not fleeing from the United States.