Corporations are people, my friend.
Then maybe we should start taxing them like people...
File the 1040 take only the standard deduction no matter your income. Revenue, not profit, is your income. Etc.
If this was implemented, it would destroy almost all companies. Grocery store net profit margins are 2-4%, if they sell $1B and make $40M and you tax them on 25% of $1B, their loss for the year would be $210M.
Apple and NVidia might survive, but any company with profit margins less than 25% or so would lose money simply by operating.
Liquidating everything or selling the business outright is the only move if you lose money by operating your business, only everyone else is trying to liquidate their assets since operating a business is guaranteed to lose money so there are no buyers.
You do have a point here. Corporate shareholders do have special protections based on the legal principle of "corporate veil", meaning that corporate owners are usually not personally responsible for the corporation’s debts or legal misdeeds.
But they do get to influence elections from behind the veil, as to further grow their privileges, it's a slippery slope indeed.
Should the president of the US (regardless of party) be able to restrict your ability to spend money on a web server because it hosts a forum about humanrights/guns/birthcontrol/etc? Or to run a news channel/blog that focuses on a particular perspective?
If not, little prevents the most endowed campaigns from changing their form factor from ads to propoganda platforms. And buying out news platforms becomes more enticing.
Whatever line you think is reasonable to draw here, would you trust a bad president with it? And would it actually solve the problem?
I don't think this is a good argument, because it's oddly specific. You can't trust a bad President to properly enforce any law. That much should be clear right now. A bad President is a general danger to the country and to the world. Among other powers, the President is the commander-in-chief!
Of course Congress has the power to impeach and remove a bad President, so you don't get a bad President without also having a bad Congress. In other words, we'd have much bigger problems than campaign finance. And I would claim that we get a bad President and a bad Congress precisely because we have no campaign finance limitations anymore.
We want to ban independent political expenditure past a certain dollar threshold. Great. How do we do that without torching legitimate civic and commercial participation, and without accidentally entrenching rich participants even more? I'm unconvinced you can do that, and unconvinced that ads are a worthy enough evil to be worth the try, particularly if it requires amending over the First Amendment. ("If" is an operative word.)
But more than that, among the organizations on the side of citizens united and against the government in that case were the ACLU and the AFL-CIO. When the civil liberties people and the unions are all on the same side of an issue as the conservative pundits against the federal government, there’s a very good chance the government is very much in the wrong.
the ACLU may have been right about the particulars they were arguing but they missed the bigger picture of how this would open the floodgates of campaign financing
you're right that CU didn't directly open the floodgates, though it did immediately unlock the option for companies to spend from their general funds without limit
But the bigger problem was SCOTUS' decision provided the reasoning that downstream courts could rely on in their decisions, and _those_ opened the floodgates (Speechnow.org vs FEC specifically)