[dh2022]

By income taxes do you mean personal income tax?

In any case, corporations benefit from airports / roads / ports / law enforcement / defense / education / etc... which are funded by local / federal governments. So corporations have a moral duty for to contribute to these expenses by paying taxes.

(But it is only a moral duty, and not a legal obligation. So corporations end up paying nothing, or next to nothing.)

[tacticalturtle]

But why not just tax the owners of the corporation more to accomplish those same goals?

Why doesn’t the moral obligation rest with the owners of the company, rather than this legal construct that was created on paper?

Corporations aren’t rich people - they are machines that allocate capital and eventually return the money with profit to the owners. They can be owned by rich people, and we can tax them.

When we add taxes on corporations, we introduce compliance issues, accounting and forecasting requirements - all complications that take away money from the actual good things we can get from corporations - jobs in the community, better product development, etc.

[StochasticLi]

Because rich people can reduce their income to 0 or close to 0 via different legal ways like LLCs, funneling through other corps, certain investments(which are basically tax-money laundering schemes), being tax residents of tax havens, etc. It depends on the country what you can do. In Germany, it's basically 0.

[peterbecich]

The rationale for a low or zero corporate tax is that corporate profits eventually become personal income of the shareholders and employees, and can be taxed there. Nobody builds a for-profit corporation for zero salary or personal profit.

Hypothetically with zero corporate tax, if the corporation paid zero salary, zero dividends, and shareholders never sold anything, the corporation could amass ridiculous amounts of untaxed wealth. But this never seems to happen.

I mean personal income taxes, plus capital gains taxes, taxes on the individual -- I am in favor of; not on the corporate entity.