[AnthonyMouse]

A huge problem seems to be that everybody wants to eat their cake and have it too. They want taxes to be paid by "corporations" by which they mean "somebody who isn't me" as if a tax increase on e.g. Amazon is not going to come out of the prices they pay for stuff on Amazon or the wages of people who work for Amazon or their 401(k) which contains shares of Amazon.

Corporations are just a legal fiction around some economic activity. If you're even tangentially involved in that activity, some of the money will end up coming from you. But since people don't want to hear that, the policy that passes is the one that obfuscates what's really happening enough that people can no longer understand what's really happening, and everyone who likes the status quo can point the finger at someone else and claim they're the villain.

Probably the best thing we could do in the US is take a bulldozer to the entire tax code and constellation of existing federal programs and replace them with something much simpler, like VAT as the only federal tax and made progressive through a UBI. No more tax avoidance, shell games, poverty traps, lobbyist corruption through the revolving door, massive federal bureaucracy, just the most basic system that causes lower income people to pay low or negative effective tax rates and higher income people to pay higher effective tax rates.