In 1952 corporate tax in the US was 33% of total revenue. Today it’s less than 9%.

There's not much laws can do to change that, that is just the way having the flexibility to structure your business in whatever way you prefer works.

If you were to reduce the US corporate tax rate to 10%, a lot more profit would be booked in the US again.

Furthermore most major corporations have had government involvement to attain their status, whether in the forum of subsidy, bailout or military procurement. Unfortunately most people aren’t aware of this “corporate welfare”.

Basically corporations which are unaccountable concentrations of public power, should not be allowed to dictate to the government, which is at least in theory accountable to the public. Unfortunately the trend has been in the opposite direction.

Until other countries lower theirs, then it's just a race to the bottom, no?

Imo, it's smarter to tax shareholders more, and corporations less. Corporations are generally productive and having the statutory seat of a multinational company in your country leads to an increase of tax revenue, because 1) people will have jobs, 2) those people will pay income tax, sales tax, will spend at (mainly local) businesses whose shareholders will be taxed, etc.

Dividend and capital gain taxes are generally also harder to avoid for the wealthy. At best you can defer them, so you'll always have to pay some tax if you want to spend $1-2-5m a year. Corporate taxes and income taxes are (very) easy to avoid.

I wonder how much it would cost to completely eliminate corporate taxes but increase dividend and capital gain taxes to say, 35-40%. Now, that said, I don't think this will ever happen. People in power love their tax breaks too much.

Take that away and I have no incentive to invest in stability but have every reason to disrupt the market and take advantage of the swings. I'm not sure you want that.

> The reason long-term investments are taxed at a lower rate is because you want to incentivize long-term investing as it increases stability.

Since most equities are held by tax exempt entities (whether that is domestic or abroad, e.g. pension funds or hedge funds in a tax haven), this argument doesn't make sense. The stock price of AAPL or YELP is not going to tank because an individual investors sells (barring perhaps the CEO).

The tax rate is lower generally to account for inflation. But not all countries have sliding capital gains tax rates. The UK has a 28% rate, most capital gains are exempt in Belgium and the Netherlands (but the latter has a small wealth tax), France just introduced a 30% rate, etc.

The "race to the bottom" is the reason why free markets are so prosperous. Each business independently works to reduce costs and competition forces companies to share those savings with consumers.

The best example of the "race to the bottom" stopping are monopolies (often gov't supported) like Comcast where they can sit fat and happy raking in a ton of profits and telling consumers to shove it.

Have they increased in line with the larger national budgets required for basic public services?

Which would do what, exactly, for most people? Precisely nothing.

And they'd use loopholes to bring their tax burden down to 0 anyway.

If you want to lower or eliminate corporate taxes (with a positive effect for people), you would need to increase dividend and capital gains taxes to compensate. You don't need to collect more corporate tax than is collected today, but if you can create more jobs, that's a net win.

Comparing the corporate tax rate in 1952 to today is pointless. In 1952, the U.K. was a shell burned out from WWII. Today, it's a tax haven luring American companies to reincorporate there. You cannot fight this process with legislation--you'll just shoot yourself in the foot and drive companies out to other countries that will be happy to receive them. This isn't just a U.S. thing--even accounting for deductions and tax breaks, the U.S. has higher corporate tax rates than our competitor countries: http://www.npr.org/2017/08/07/541797699/fact-check-does-the-.... The "real" amount of taxes paid in the U.S. is about 18.6%, versus 8.5% for Canada, 11.2% for France, and 4.1% for South Korea.

They have influence on government because they pay politicians bribes that get them elected. Endless evidence to support that where companies or industries give money, politicians get elected, and politicians pass laws to give those companies benefits they want that aren't good for voters or even the voters money. The politicians get wealth and power in return. End of story.

The rest is narrative the politicians use to distract from that. Now, they do like bringing jobs and contracts into their districts to increase their votes. They operate on money, though. Recent example with ISP's:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15100620/congress-fcc-isp...

The oil companies make it even more obvious. They're making insane profits but still get tax subsidies from the politicians they paid off.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/12/us-taxpa...

It’s quite simple, with financial power comes political power. Elections cost a lot of money these days and if you look at the donor list of both parties it’s dominated by large corporations.

Edit: a more useful metric will be the percentage of total revenue paid by corporations. As can be seen the tax rate is misleading.

The government doesn't "permit" outsourcing of U.S. jobs. Thanks to the technology created by folks here on HN, there is nothing the government can really do if IBM decides to fire a worker in New York and hire one in Bangalore. The only thing the government can really do is offer concessions and incentives to reduce the bleeding.

> It’s quite simple, with financial power comes political power. Elections cost a lot of money these days and if you look at the donor list of both parties it’s dominated by large corporations.

The party that spent the most money just lost the most recent major election, so I'm not convinced money really matters much. In reality, we spend a minuscule amount on politics given the size of the country. About 0.0037% of GDP on Presidential elections, and 0.019% of GDP on lobbying. For context, we spend less on lobbying each year than we do on specialty coffee.

If money really bought elections, companies would spend a lot more of it trying to do so.

This scholarly study found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.“

Hardly a surprising fact. Polls show most Americans believe the government is dominated by a small group of special interests who are looking out for themselves.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Even the threat of money buys politicians. Case in point: the repeal of Obamacare is wildly unpopular with the US public, but the Koch brothers got a majority of the house of representatives to vote for it. How? Simple: they threatened that any GOP representative who voted against it, would face a primary opponent in their district next year with $millions in funding. They don't even have to spend the millions (although they do), because simply the threat of a well funded primary challenger is enough for them to buy votes.

It's a great tragedy that the supreme court has effectively taken our democracy away from us by ruling that money is speech, and protected by the first amendment.

Also, you’ve got it backwards about Citizens United. The Supreme Court didn’t rule that money is speech. Instead, detractors are trying to convince people that speech (the case was about a political movie) is actually money.

And this is one of the many reasons I despise the UK currently (I'm British). The citizenry do not benefit from these arrangements. If anything people seem to becoming more aware of it and more pissed off about it.

I love how the UK likes to torpedo any EU attempt to overhaul and address these greedy little sweetheart deals as well.

I know it’s hard to believe, but the next 15 years will see a dramatic rise of government power and higher corporate taxes. This will happen very suddenly with one party taking complete control of all the branches of government along with having a dominant ideology at their back. Doesn’t really matter if Republicans or Democrats are in control, we can see the progressives on the left like Sherrod Brown, and populists like Steve Bannon on the right (who has spoken highly of Senator Brown), advocating shockingly similar proposals.

I’m also pessimistic but that doesn’t mean we should give up. There’s nothing about this that’s writ in stone.

But I agree with you that you can't ignore corporations' outsized influence on corporate taxes.

treat it like the olympics. if an athlete that takes a performance enhancing drug that has yet to be prohibited, they still loose their medals and cannot compete.

The US leverage is limiting access to US markets for companies that do that.

As bad as China is to foreign companies, they're still bashing away at the doors to be let in. Imagine any of GAFA being blocked from doing business in the US.

You have multinationals getting around a design flaw in the US tax system, by acquiring a foreign entity and going abroad.

Of course those companies will just search out another legal alternative to avoid paying taxes. And that is well within their rights.

I highly doubt that is true. I mean, there are only 3 basic economics sectors, and you just stroke an entire one out of the question.

It is way more likely that the reality is more nuanced, and the US can not efficiently manufacture some things, while keeping the lead on some other things.