> I'm suggesting that you bypass the problem by eliminating corporate taxes...

The problem doesn't go away— there are a hundred and one ways that companies can receive favours from the government other than tax breaks: land giveaways, pollution exemptions, utility discounts, trade/tariff deals, infrastructure like highways/rail/fibre being routed in such a way that benefits their locations or supply chains, etc etc.

If your government officials are corrupt or untrustworthy, that's a problem to deal with at the source, not by trying to tie their hands by taking away some of the tools they use to set policy.

You're missing the point hard. You can still tax the corporation by taxing everyone who earns income from it. You just don't tax the business entity itself.

You aren't taxing the corporation, you are taxing an individual. We can pretend that is somehow a tax on the corporation, but it isn't. Corporations hold vast sums of cash that isn't "income" to an individual. That money can/is used to enrich the upper-levels of those corporations, outside of becoming "income" for them. "Business" dinners. "Business" travel. "Business" retreats. You could try to create complex tax laws to make people individually liable for it, but good luck enforcing that or writing them in a way that doesn't leave loopholes open for the wealthy. You had a business lunch to try and seal a new deal? Guess what, you all now need to file that as personal income and be taxed at 25%, including the people you were treating. That team celebration for a successful launch? Each team member owes 25% of whatever was spent on you (hope someone was tallying it all correctly).

I think you're misunderstanding some of the moving parts here. All of those deductions you described would be taken either way, whether the tax is on the individual or on the corporation. They are already taken today to shave down corporate tax liability. So at best, the objection you're raising is a zero sum game. But even worse than that, and as a matter of fact, there would be less incentive to fulfill all of the compliance burden of tracking those deductions if corporations were not taxed but individuals were.

I don't think it's workable because it creates all the wrong incentives around hiring:

- Foreign workers will be even more competitive than they are today relative to domestic (because they won't have to be compensated for the additional income tax burden).

- Capital expenditures, automation, etc will all be more competitive vs. hiring workers.

- Companies look for even more non-worker ways to spend cash, such as increasing their political power via lobbying.

Maybe none of this is bad long term, or it all comes out in the wash eventually, but trying to sell this in the short term sounds like political suicide to me— I don't think the purported benefits of 0% tax on corps is even remotely worth it. Corporations benefit from government services; they can pay taxes directly on the value they generate.