The act of reducing the manpower of the IRS needed to enforce the laws may have a greater effect than all the tax cuts combined. If a business is fairly certain an audit isn't coming, their effective tax rate is whatever they want it to be.
That said, the absurd complexity of the tax code is also a problem here, since you don't want the government doling out bankruptcy-inducing penalties on businesses that might just be making an honest mistake. The whole system clearly needs an overhaul. It should be simple enough that when a business severely underpays, it will be very likely that they did so on purpose, and therefore a large, deterrent-worthy penalty can be justified.
Given clear and straightforward code/laws, it becomes hard to cheat.
The consequence is that for anything moderately or more complex there is actually no correct answer on what your tax liability is. What is the value of an intangible asset? How do you define novelty for the R&D tax credit? There are thousands of intersecting rules that change your liability and many of those are up to interpretation.
Just like Healthcare and Gun control, there are industries and 3rd parties with vested interests in keeping the system complicated and hard to track or enforce so they can profit.
You ascribe too much to malice, when it is typically just plain old politics. Representative will only vote to tax X if his/her constituent Y is excluded somehow. Add these types of items over many bills/years and you get what we have today.
Remember in 2016 when the IRS wanted to mail out prefilled tax forms that tax payers would just sign and send back for or with a check? Remember how the tax industry lobbied Congress to pass the Free File Act of 2016 which permanently bars the IRS from providing free filing services?
I suppose that wasn't malice.
What about when big corporations lobby Congress to not close loop holes?
http://www.citizen.org/documents/corporate-tax-lobbying-repo...
Call it "plain old politics" or call it "malice" but either way it's intentional.
It breeds sociopathy among the executive class that doesn't need any help in that department while encouraging nonproductive "investment".
This is not at all true.