The conclusion:
Bolling said the United States has "the highest corporate tax rate in the free
world." He was referring to the statutory rate, meaning the rate before
deductions. On that score, he’s right: The United States does have the highest
statutory rate among developed countries. However, the United States’ corporate
tax rate doesn’t appear to be the highest once deductions and other exclusions
are taken into account.
You often see 12% or 13% bandied about as the effective rate, but that's intentional intellectual fraud: they refer to 2010 numbers, when the US was coming out of the great recession and corporations had lost a ton of money.
If you are in the libertarian and/or conservative branch of U.S. politics why do you look to other countries' tax rates for guidance on what our tax rates ought to be? I have been under the impression that looking to other countries for guidance on our social policy is bad and contrary to the notion of exceptionalism.
The U.S. uniquely, I believe, considers corporations persons. Hence the Citizens United decision. Given this shouldn't the tax rate on these citizens be the same as on other citizens with like earnings?
Blaming Citizens United (certainly a harmful decision) on corporate personhood is, while popular, unduly reductive; the actual ruling was more about freedom of association. Even in the context of the debate about corporate personhood, your rhetorical question about tax rate is pure demagogy.
People who refer to taxes as confiscatory rather than as being too high are attempting to frame the topic of taxation as it being, necessarily, wrong. It's a ridiculous starting point. These same people almost always scoff at arguments that the U.S. ought to adopt some social policies because all other industrialized nations have them. It is, with this fact in mind, quite rational to ask why looking at the corporate tax rate of other countries is a good argument.
Why is it demagoguery to ask why a person in the form of a corporation should pay less in taxes than a person in the form of a human?
As for what I called demagoguery: I mean, corporations are considered legal persons in most countries - that's where the word corporation comes from - which is what allows them to own property, enter into contracts, etc., as well as to violate the law. So then the US has been more uniquely inclined to allow corporations to claim rights originally intended for natural persons (such as free speech, contract rights, property rights, rights of the accused); and there is valid criticism of that idea for various reasons, the most obvious one being that they're very different from actual people, so Congress should have to explicitly decide what privileges corporations should have rather than the judicial system tacking on existing ones. But on the other hand, it's not completely ridiculous to say that since corporations and people have similar sets of abilities in the eyes of the law, the same principles should apply, especially with respect to commerce.
Even in the case of corporate free speech, there are certainly situations where governmental restrictions on a corporation's speech would feel fundamentally wrong - e.g. suppose Congress decided political activism groups, from the EFF to the NRA, were only allowed to use corporate funds to spread their message at all if Congress liked them. Citizens United, as I said, approached this in terms of freedom of association more than corporate personhood, but neither does it seem immediately absurd to try to solve it the latter way. (Incidentally, the need to find, and the partial arbitrariness of, a dividing line between that example on one hand which should have constitutional protection, and super PACs on the other which should not, is why "corporations aren't people" is a bit simplistic as an approach to solving the Citizens United problem. You really don't want to remove protection from the former.)
Anyway, it seems self-evident that corporations and individuals need at least somewhat separate treatment by tax law (e.g. because of the double taxation issue when corporations pay out earnings to shareholders). Given that corporate personhood in general is not fundamentally and irrevocably an evil or unfair idea, merely specific implementations of it, it's not fair to be reductive and say that the person analogy must be taken to absurd extremes.
The corporations have the money and the drive to get the laws changed, who else does?
It seems pretty simple to me. If you want your laws changed, pool your money and go lobby the gov't just like every other corporation.
https://medium.com/@lessig/we-tried-we-learned-we-re-trying-...
A recent Senate campaign in one of the nation's cheapest media markets (Jon Tester's) was run for ~15 million bucks[0] in coordinated campaign funds, plus probably-larger undisclosed amounts of "independent" campaign funding through PAC's etc.
In the same cheap media market, Senator Max Baucus raised >$5 million[1] for the coordinated campaign in his final Senate race, in which he ran effectively unopposed. Again this $5 million does not account for his pre-existing war chest from thirty five years of Senate campaigns or the (vastly larger) fundraising of his GlacierPAC or other related "independent" political organizations.
So the minimum single-senator campaign cost is probably somewhere between those two bounds. Therefore I don't regard the core idea of Mayday PAC as a failure; instead it seems like they need to scale it before we can decide if it's workable.
[0] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n0002...
[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=n0000...
Any rule set can be gamed / broken.
To keep the game going, sometimes players just need to do the right thing, thereby honoring other player's investment in the game.
And law is so much more complicated than a board game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor...
I could see a coherent tax code that taxes corporations, but not individuals, or one that taxed individuals, but not corporations (Of course with either of these there would no doubt be all sorts of new loopholes to deal with). But taxing both seems odd to me.
In Australia, my company gets taxed at a flat 30% on all profits in a year. If I want to take cash out of the company after that tax has been taken, I pay "top-up" tax that brings the total tax paid to the level of my income tax rate.
For example, if the company earned $10000, after all expenses, then it would pay $3000 in tax, leaving $7000 left that I can take out. If I earned no money in the year, my income tax rate is 0%, so the top-up tax is -$3000 (I.e. I get a tax refund for $3000). If I earned $50000 in the year, then my income tax rate is 32.5%, so I would have to pay top-up tax of $250 (I.e. 2.5% of the original $10000, which has already been taxed 30%).
Double taxation shouldn't happen, and while my company was set up for tax minimisation purposes, international corporations are able to do an insane level of fuckery to avoid almost all taxation.
1: http://assets.amuniversal.com/921b06d016420130ff2c001dd8b71c...
http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Sales-Tax-Deduction-Calculato...
Taxing corporate profits directly at all only accomplishes the following things:
* The profits that are redistributed to shareholders end up being double-taxed; the corporation pays tax on them, and then distributes them to shareholders who pay income tax on them.
* The profits that are reinvested end up being taxed, which reduces the amount that the corporation can reinvest. This directly reduces economic activity, since reinvestment often manifests itself in things like hiring and construction; in other words, increased economic activity. In practice, it might be possible to avoid taxes on these reinvestment activities by accounting for them as expenses and saying, "I guess we didn't make any profit this quarter".
* The profits that are held as cash are taxed, and this isn't actually as big of a deal unless the company is building up a massive stockpile to reinvest later, but in this case it would be fairer to just tax a corporation's cash holdings directly. This would also incentivize corporations to either reinvest their profits or distribute them as dividends, either of which is better for the economy as a whole.
I'm uncomfortable with the line of reasoning that we "can't do anything until we change the system," but I do wonder how Wall Street would react to a company that decided for moral reasons to avoid the schemes and pay more taxes.
Edit: answered above.
There are actually people who do everything they can to minimise their tax liability in order to reduce the money spent on things they consider unjust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance.
Every dollar not paid in US tax is a dollar that won't contribute to blowing up people in the Middle East who have the misfortune of being in proximity to suspected terrorists (tens of thousands of people over the past decade) [1]. Similarly, every dollar not paid in US tax is a dollar that won't be spent putting poor people in prison for smoking a weed that causes less violence in a decade than alcohol causes in a day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_war...