[Loughla]

>It feels good to tax a corporation, but it's much more practical, efficient, and transparent to keep taxes at the personal and consumer level.

That is a very, very bold claim. Please provide bold evidence or reasoning.

>The right answer is to take such tools out of politician's hands by ending the taxes in the first place.

So there is a corrupt system, and the only solution is to just destroy it? I don't get it.

[calpaterson]

> That is a very, very bold claim. Please provide bold evidence or reasoning.

A selection of common reasons to oppose corporation tax:

- It encourages financing via debt instead of equity (debt payments come of pre-tax profit, equity dividends do not). Debt financing is far more systemically unstable than equity financing.

- Corp tax applies to profits that will be reinvested as well as those that will be withdrawn via dividends, buybacks, etc. Taxing reinvestment (eg in equipment, premises, etc) is very undesirable.

- Companies are highly motivated and well able to avoid it, which means, eg that corp tax falls on small companies more than bigger ones, and that it's administratively complicated to collect (litigation is often required)

In short, corp tax is a tax on money that companies often invest and leads to the most phenomenal hijinks to get out of it. IMO would be better to lower it and raise other taxes instead (eg capital gains, dividend tax).

[kogus]

User jdasdf already responded with an excellent resource on the economic arguments. I can add this link as well, which you may find interesting: https://www.europeanceo.com/finance/zero-corporation-tax-the...

In short, corporate taxes are going to be passed on the shareholders or consumers. So just tax them instead.

Why is that better? For one thing, those individuals get to vote, so they can object in a legitimate way if they feel the taxes are unjust. For another, it removes a vehicle for government mismanagement and corruption.

As for your last sentence:

  So there is a corrupt system, and the only solution is to just destroy it? I don't get it. 

I'd prefer to think about systems on a spectrum of their vulnerability to corruption, and what mitigations to corruption are feasible. In the current framework of regulation and taxation, we have a situation where corporations are, on paper, liable for huge tax burdens, and politicians can choose to lighten that load at their discretion. That's a recipe for extreme favoritism and corruption, especially when you consider most of these decisions are made at a local or state level, where media scrutiny and public awareness is especially weak.

In this case, in my opinion, the best answer is to take the sharp-edged toys away from the children, by which I mean eliminate the possibility of corporate taxes (and therefore favoritism) in favor of more direct and fair taxation on the individuals who end up paying them anyway.

[jdasdf]

[Eliminating or severely reducing corporate taxation is a fairly mainstream idea in economics](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CorporateTaxation.html)

[ceejayoz]

That's the website of a conservative think-tank.

[dragonwriter]

Not only that, but it offers no support at all for its claims of broad support for the idea. It is an ideological propaganda outfit offering unsupported claims that an element of its ideology is broadly popular outside of that ideology.

[hn_ta]

Why don't you argue the point and offer an alternative opinion or rebuttal instead of profiling the messenger?

[ceejayoz]

The messenger is relevant, at times, and is at least worth mentioning. I'm skeptical of "everyone agrees with me!" coming from any think tank, left or right.

https://taxfoundation.org/case-not-eliminating-corporate-inc..., for example, argues that relying on taxing shareholders instead of the corporation ignores foreign shareholders whose income isn't subject to US taxation. (For similar disclosure, they're generally considered right-leaning.)

[hn_ta]

> for example, argues that relying on taxing shareholders instead of the corporation ignores foreign shareholders whose income isn't subject to US taxation.

And that is a good point to discuss/argue, regardless of the messenger. You could do the same with the previous resource as well; pull out points that you like/dislike and we discuss around that as opposed to shooting down any discussion because you don't like the messenger.

[gruez]

>argues that relying on taxing shareholders instead of the corporation ignores foreign shareholders whose income isn't subject to US taxation.

They aren't? What about withholding tax?

[ceejayoz]

That's on income, not capital gains.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/nonusresidenttax...

> Nonresident aliens are subject to no U.S. capital gains tax, but capital gains taxes will likely be paid in your country of origin.

> Nonresident aliens are subject to a dividend tax rate of 30% on dividends paid out by U.S. companies.

[proxyon]

Workers at conservative think-tanks breathe oxygen. Ergo, breathing oxygen is wrong.

[ceejayoz]

Take a quick spin through their "encyclopedia" and see.

Labor unions? Bad! Climate change? Probably good, actually!

Their article on oxygen would be "oxygen is good, always" or "oxygen is bad, always". They don't leave much room for nuance in their encyclopedia, and unsourced assertions of a policies popularity in their writings can probably be treated with a grain of salt.

[proxyon]

The thing is the assertion that corporate taxes are bad is incredibly mundane. Not in a pro-pro-big business kind of way but in a pro-everyone kind of way. The problem with corporate taxes is that they are easily dodged via the most mundane write-offs, exchanges and planned for deduction. Corporate taxes are offset by a company by simple hiring a tax lawyer. Individual taxes are far harder to dodge and basically require the individual to abandon his/her country in order to do it, or to cheat by putting them in a dark bank account overseas. This is not a partisan issue. If you want a corporation to pay its taxes, put its taxes on the people who make money off that corporation.

[ceejayoz]

> This is not a partisan issue.

The best way to demonstrate that would be to link to a more neutral source, or sources across the partisan spectrum.

"Here's an op-ed by a conservative think tank about why taxes are bad" is gonna get people expressing very reasonable skepticism.

[CapitalistCartr]

The general principle is that corporate taxations are merely a concealed tax on the Public, as corporations merely pass all expenses, including taxes, on to their customers. Except Silicon Valley Startups, they run on VC money indefinitely, so can afford to sell at any loss.

[marcosdumay]

> So there is a corrupt system, and the only solution is to just destroy it?

There's merit to this idea. Often enough the correct fix for a broken system is to throw it away and replace it with something more resilient, even if you lose some theoretical optimality.

This is similar to the people that want to legalize all drugs to reduce crime.

[proxyon]

> That is a very, very bold claim. Please provide bold evidence or reasoning.

No it's not. This is common knowledge in the economics world. Corporations can dodge taxes in ways individuals mostly can't.