I think the author 100% knew what he was doing by not mentioning QE directly at any point. It isn't just since 2008, the cut in 03-04 to 1% was basically why synthetic CDOs were invented...it is amazing that this happened twenty years ago, and there is still a "debate" about the long-term financial consequences of very low interest rates/QE.

Also, the issue with corporate taxes has been more to do with European tax havens. Places like Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg got very aggressive in offering corporations bilateral deals (i.e. bespoke deals on corporation tax outside the legal framework that applied to domestic companies). The US tax rate in the early 2010s was still 35%, it was only when revenue began moving offshore that the US felt the need to cut (not just the US, the same thing happened in the UK). The global minimum corporation tax deal is supposed to tackle this but, to be honest, the US should have cracked down on individual countries far sooner.

> Figure 2 makes clear that a key driver was the decline in corporate interest rates—which itself largely reflects the steady, decades-long march down in Treasury yields.

This is a direct reference to QE.

Corporate tax does not help or hurt labor.

Corporations do not pay taxes - their customers or their employees do.

The only way that a corporate tax is better for the worker than not a corporate tax is if that money will be better spent by the government. We cannot show this to be true, because very often government funds are utilized to fund programs and projects that are primarily ideologically motivated instead of mere improvements to facilities and entitlements we all use.

Additionally sectors that have largesse of government spend (Medicare, military procurement, California HSR) start to morph to maximally abuse procurement bureaucracy and obtain monopoly power rather than provide service.

These problems are solvable to be clear, but it doesn't strike me as obvious that the money Amazon makes is spent better by Congress than by Amazon in every possible case.

This is true. Corporate tax is just a tax on consumers, workers, or investors, with extra steps.

Look at companies with enormous stockpiles of cash, or doing stock buybacks. They're just sitting on it, when some of it could be better spent on crumbling infrastructure that their delivery vehicles drive on, for example.