A selection of common reasons to oppose corporation tax:
- It encourages financing via debt instead of equity (debt payments come of pre-tax profit, equity dividends do not). Debt financing is far more systemically unstable than equity financing.
- Corp tax applies to profits that will be reinvested as well as those that will be withdrawn via dividends, buybacks, etc. Taxing reinvestment (eg in equipment, premises, etc) is very undesirable.
- Companies are highly motivated and well able to avoid it, which means, eg that corp tax falls on small companies more than bigger ones, and that it's administratively complicated to collect (litigation is often required)
In short, corp tax is a tax on money that companies often invest and leads to the most phenomenal hijinks to get out of it. IMO would be better to lower it and raise other taxes instead (eg capital gains, dividend tax).
In short, corporate taxes are going to be passed on the shareholders or consumers. So just tax them instead.
Why is that better? For one thing, those individuals get to vote, so they can object in a legitimate way if they feel the taxes are unjust. For another, it removes a vehicle for government mismanagement and corruption.
As for your last sentence:
So there is a corrupt system, and the only solution is to just destroy it? I don't get it.
In this case, in my opinion, the best answer is to take the sharp-edged toys away from the children, by which I mean eliminate the possibility of corporate taxes (and therefore favoritism) in favor of more direct and fair taxation on the individuals who end up paying them anyway.
https://taxfoundation.org/case-not-eliminating-corporate-inc..., for example, argues that relying on taxing shareholders instead of the corporation ignores foreign shareholders whose income isn't subject to US taxation. (For similar disclosure, they're generally considered right-leaning.)
And that is a good point to discuss/argue, regardless of the messenger. You could do the same with the previous resource as well; pull out points that you like/dislike and we discuss around that as opposed to shooting down any discussion because you don't like the messenger.
They aren't? What about withholding tax?
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/nonusresidenttax...
> Nonresident aliens are subject to no U.S. capital gains tax, but capital gains taxes will likely be paid in your country of origin.
> Nonresident aliens are subject to a dividend tax rate of 30% on dividends paid out by U.S. companies.
Labor unions? Bad! Climate change? Probably good, actually!
Their article on oxygen would be "oxygen is good, always" or "oxygen is bad, always". They don't leave much room for nuance in their encyclopedia, and unsourced assertions of a policies popularity in their writings can probably be treated with a grain of salt.
The best way to demonstrate that would be to link to a more neutral source, or sources across the partisan spectrum.
"Here's an op-ed by a conservative think tank about why taxes are bad" is gonna get people expressing very reasonable skepticism.
There's merit to this idea. Often enough the correct fix for a broken system is to throw it away and replace it with something more resilient, even if you lose some theoretical optimality.
This is similar to the people that want to legalize all drugs to reduce crime.
No it's not. This is common knowledge in the economics world. Corporations can dodge taxes in ways individuals mostly can't.
That is a very, very bold claim. Please provide bold evidence or reasoning.
>The right answer is to take such tools out of politician's hands by ending the taxes in the first place.
So there is a corrupt system, and the only solution is to just destroy it? I don't get it.