Corporate income tax is a bad idea. It should be cut to zero.
If you run a corporation, and a larger tax bill comes, you will keep your own salary (hence, wealth) and either pass the tax onto your employees or cut employee benefits/jobs to afford the tax.
With corporate tax in effect what you are doing is handing the responsibility of allocating obligations to the owners/controllers of the corporation. They will definitely choose to pay the tax in a regressive manner.
Instead what must be done is a progressive income tax, enforced evenly, even for owners of corporations. Unsurprisingly, what we are seeing today is an immense tax cut for high earners.
Corporate income tax exists because S-corps have legally distinct income. If you set that rate to 0, there would be nothing stopping everyone from forming an S corp, transacting solely via that S corp, and evading massive amounts of tax.
One policy economists of all stripes agree on is having 0 tax on corporations. We should tax the profits when they show up in the owner’s income. Otherwise, you are taxing owners who are poor.
That's not how taxes work, though. By the time a corporation pays taxes, employees have already been paid, and that's a business expense that hasn't been taxed.
Ironically, if you reduce employee salaries or benefits, then you will have lower expenses, and thus a larger amount of profits you have to pay taxes on (regardless of the tax rate).
I do agree that corporate tax should be progressive, though, just like personal income taxes are. Corporate taxes used to be progressive, but Trump and the GOP changed that in 2017.
If you run a corporation, and a larger tax bill comes, you will keep your own salary (hence, wealth) and either pass the tax onto your employees or cut employee benefits/jobs to afford the tax.
With corporate tax in effect what you are doing is handing the responsibility of allocating obligations to the owners/controllers of the corporation. They will definitely choose to pay the tax in a regressive manner.
Instead what must be done is a progressive income tax, enforced evenly, even for owners of corporations. Unsurprisingly, what we are seeing today is an immense tax cut for high earners.