National Journal reported last night that a new coalition of corporations has formed, with the goal of pushing the fiscal super committee (tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction) to adopt a lower corporate tax rate:

A group of blue chip companies and business organizations is launching a coalition Tuesday morning to push Congress to lower the corporate tax rate and make it more competitive with America’s trading partners.

The Reducing America’s Taxes Equitably Coalition includes Altria Client Services, FedEx, Verizon, the Association of American Railroads and Walt Disney

“In a global economy where capital is highly mobile, it is simply harder to compete from America,” the companies’ executives wrote in a letter. “A lower corporate tax rate will boost investment in the U.S., bringing more American jobs, innovation and growth.”

But American companies already pay the second lowest taxes in the developed world, once all of the loopholes and deductions in the corporate tax code are accounted for. American corporations are sitting on record amounts of cash, so its unclear why more cash (in the form of tax breaks) would lead to more hiring.

In addition, as the Nation’s Allison Kilkenny noted, two of the companies involved in the coalition — Verizon and FedEx — are already dodging their share of taxes:

Both Verizon and FedEx are multibillion-dollar corporations that pay lower tax rates than you do, and the reason Verizon is able to do this is by creatively redirecting profits to their foreign wireless partner, Vodafone.

Vodafone has been the longtime target of UK Uncut due to its equally unscrupulous tax dodging practices. The company claims a large portion of its revenue should not be subject to British taxation because they reroute the cash through Luxembourg, which has a tax rate of under 10 percent. [...] So here we have an exploitative company, Verizon, channeling its income to another corrupt partner in Britain, all in the name of avoiding taxation.

And then there’s FedEx, a company with a long history of battling the IRS, but which has thus far remained relatively under the radar despite its shady practices. The GAO released a report in 2007 that stated FedEx has twenty-one subsidiaries in jurisdictions listed as tax havens (Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, three in the Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Grenada, two in Hong Kong, three in Ireland, two in Netherland Antilles, Singapore, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Turks and Caicos Islands and the US Virgin Islands).

Several companies, including Boeing and Cisco, have lobbied for tax breaks while engaging in widespread tax dodging. In fact, a whole slew of companies that pay incredibly low U.S. corporate taxes are lobbying for a specific tax break on overseas profit that, when tried previously, did not cause any of its desired effects.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), who was once courted to run for president, attacked President Obama’s plan to raise taxes on millionaires, telling Fox News host Greta Van Susteren last night that Obama’s policies have already created “a lot fewer” wealthy people:

DANIELS: You know, the president keeps ranting on and on about these, you know, millionaires he dislikes so much. By the way, he ought to feel pretty good. There are a lot fewer of them than there were when he became president. Just look at the statistics.

Watch it:

Daniels’ claim plays into the GOP’s new “class warfare” talking point, but if one actually “look[s] at the statistics,” one has to wonder if Daniels thinks it’s opposite day. As the Wall Street Journal reported in late June, there are actually a record number of millionaires now, two and half years into the Obama administration:

According to the annual World Wealth Report from Merill Lynch and Capgemini, the U.S. had 3.1 million millionaires in 2010, up from 2.86 million in 2009. The latest figure tops the pre-crisis peak of three million.[...]

The wealth held by these millionaires also hit a record. North American millionaires had a combined wealth of $11.6 trillion, up from $10.7 trillion in 2009.

According to a different group’s measurement of millionaires, the number of millionaires grew 16 percent in 2009, Obama’s first year in office, and another 8 percent in 2010.

In fact, the growth in the number and wealth of millionaires over the past two years exposes the fallacy of Daniels’ argument — these people don’t need any more help. The growth of the wealthy, and especially the super-wealthy, while the middle- and working-class have seen wages stagnate or drop shows the “two-speed recovery,” which has been good for millionaires but bad for everyone else.