We desperately need a new bipartisan tax bill to reform corporate taxes.

Within the past 60 years or so, corporate income taxes have declined dramatically as a share of U.S. GDP. In the early 1950s, U.S. corporate tax revenues averaged 5.3 percent of GDP. Over the most recent five years, U.S. corporate profits tax revenues averaged only 1.4 percent of GDP.

To increase revenue, we must cut the tax rate.

During the Eisenhower administration, the highest corporate income tax rate stood at 52 percent, and the economy stagnated, with real GDP growth dropping to negative 1 percent in his last year. In fact, John F. Kennedy’s principle economic campaign slogan was that he would get “America going and growing again” through tax cuts. He lived up to his promise.

Kennedy, confronting strong Republican opposition, cut the highest individual income tax rate to 70 percent from 91 percent and the highest corporate tax rate to 48 percent. The ensuing period was called the “Go-Go Sixties.” Real GDP growth rates during 1962 to 1966 averaged 5.8 percent, and the unemployment rate fell to less than 4 percent. The budget was essentially balanced in 1965. Not too shabby.

Compare the Kennedy 1960s to the term of President Barack Obama, wherein deficits remain at bloated levels, unemployment is unconscionably high and tax rates have just recently been raised. As if past experience wasn’t clear enough, Obama now wants to raise tax rates even higher. Is it any wonder we have the worst recovery ever?

As opposed to the Kennedy 1960s, now it’s the Republicans who want tax cuts and jobs and the Democrats who oppose them. Welfare and stagnation seem good enough for modern Democrats as they were for old-timey Republicans. Oh, how the world of politics has changed. But sometimes Republicans can work hand-in-hand with Democrats and make sensible decisions.

It was President Ronald Reagan in 1986, in partnership with almost all of the Democrats, who passed the 1986 Tax Act. In a 97-3 vote, the Senate passed a bill cutting the highest personal income tax rate to 28 percent and reducing the highest corporate tax rate to 34 percent. The economy continued its amazing expansion with only two bumps in the road. First, Republican George H. W. Bush raised the highest income tax rate to 31 percent for individuals and 35 percent for corporations. Second, Democrat President Clinton bopped that highest individual tax rate up again to 39.6 percent. But then Clinton saw the light.

He pushed NAFTA through Congress. He cut taxes on higher-income elderly workers by eliminating the “retirement test” on Social Security. He signed into law the biggest capital gains tax cut in history, lowering the highest tax rate to 20 percent from 28 percent and exempting from taxation capital gains on owner-occupied homes. He cut federal government spending as a share of GDP by more than 3.5 percentage points. He signed welfare reform into law. As a result, the economy took off, unemployment fell and the federal budget went into surplus. As you can see, it’s not political parties that matters, it’s economics.

Just consider today’s circumstances:

■ Our corporate tax rate of 35 percent is the highest federal statutory corporate tax rate in the 34 developed nations. Since 1987, while the highest U.S. corporate rate stayed approximately the same, the rest of the 33 developed nations cut corporate tax rates to an average of 25 percent. The problem isn’t that the U.S. has raised corporate income tax rates; it’s that the U.S. hasn’t cut corporate tax rates to stay competitive. In today’s globally integrated economy, it should come as no surprise that companies are able to navigate the world’s tax codes with agility to improve shareholder returns.

■U.S. corporate tax revenues as a share of GDP are near the lowest in the world. Companies have become increasingly sophisticated in avoiding the corporate income tax, resulting in a plunge in corporate income tax revenues as a share of GDP.

■In 1987, pass-through corporations such as LLCs and “S” Corps surpassed in number “C” Corporations and have nearly tripled relative to “C” Corps since. Much of this change was due to the 1986 Tax Act’s lower personal income tax rates, which incentivized business owners to reorganize their firms into pass-through entities, which pay taxes at the personal level and escape taxation at the corporate level.

■The U.S. corporate tax code has become renowned for its enormously complicated nature.

Some huge and successful companies quite literally pay no taxes at all. In a study published by The Laffer Center, my colleagues and I estimate that the out-of-pocket cost of compliance with the income tax code was $431 billion in 2008. That equates to a markup of 30 cents in compliance costs for every dollar of tax collected. With the enormous complexity of the corporate tax code, the compliance costs for corporate income taxes are likely even higher than they are for individual income taxes.

■The U.S. is the only major country that taxes profits earned outside the U.S. at the U.S. tax rate when repatriated with a credit for foreign taxes paid. As a result, an estimated $1.7 trillion of U.S. corporate profits earned abroad are sitting in other countries. This figure is growing at an estimated $300 billion a year.

■The U.S. corporate tax code universally punishes success while often rewarding failure. Arguments have been advanced about redistribution, taking some income from the highest earners to subsidize the nation’s poorest, but no such logic applies to the corporate income tax. It makes absolutely no sense to punish companies who make profits by making good products at low cost, yet subsidizing companies that operate at a loss by making inferior products with high costs.

The U.S. needs to revamp the corporate tax code by substituting a far broader tax base for corporate profits, eliminating all sorts of deductions, credits, write-offs and other loopholes, and lowering the corporate tax rate commensurately. In static terms, a tax rate well below 5 percent on value added could fully replace all federal corporate tax revenues and create far higher GDP growth rates.

The ideal low-rate flat tax would have the lowest tax rate on the broadest tax base. Such a tax system would impose the least impediment on the economy per dollar of tax revenue and therefore would stand the greatest chance of promoting prosperity.

For reporting purposes, businesses would only need to know their sales and purchases from other tax reporting entities. The value added tax base is simply sales minus purchases from other tax-reporting entities.

The tax rate should be one single rate applied equally to all value added. And that tax rate should be sufficiently low so as not to unduly impede prosperity.

Politicians come and go, but economics is here to stay.

Arthur Laffer is chairman of Laffer Associates in Nashville, Tenn. Michelle Balconi is a Metro Detroit-based freelance writer.