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.