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Comment by pge | Hacker News Reader

This is probably naive (and feel free to tell me why it is), but why have corporate tax at all? Why not only tax individual income? It seems much easier for corporations to dodge taxes by moving their domicile and such things. Much harder (or at least a lot more inconvenient)for individuals to move jurisdictions to dodge taxes or to have other complex avoidance strategies (particularly if the tax code were simplified).

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This isn’t a naïve question at all. My suspicion is that corporate taxes exist because they are the only politically-palatable way to impose taxes on the middle class (also known as “where the money is”). However, legal avoidance has gotten so prevalent among larger corporations that the futility of taxing them is becoming more obvious. How that translates into “raise the corporate tax rate”, I couldn’t tell you.

The corporate tax exists as a policy lever to get companies to do things. It's unpalatable to actually spend money on solar power, but tax credits kinda work the same way. Lower risk in a sense, since there's no outlay if nobody does anything, at the cost of stupidly complex laws and exceptions.

It's not a uncommon school of thought that the corporate tax rate should be 0% the biggest issue is the concern that without taxes the hording of money inside the corporation would get crazy but Apple already does that so it might not be as big of an issue as people think.

Right, but isn't most of Apple's cash hoard held outside of the US's tax jurisdiction, under much more favorable tax regimes? Seems like that might be an argument for a 0% tax; at least if the US didn't tax corporate profits, more of that money might be kept in the US. It's not guaranteed that it would be spent (thus injecting money into the US economy), but at least it would be possible for that to happen.

I don't think there's any benefit from keeping cash abroad for us corps, that was removed with trump's tax changes.

(And even before it was delayed taxation, not tax free)

I believe the Trump tax cuts only provided a temporary benefit for repatriation of foreign earnings.

There was a one time repatriation mechanism, but it also removed the deferred taxation of foreign earnings.

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-a-compari...

Makes sense. And incentive companies to keep employees and manufacturing in USA as well...

If a corporation doesn't want to pay corporate taxes, it always has the option of going private.

On the off chance that you don’t understand the downvotes: all corporations, public and private, pay taxes on recognized income.

Private companies don't have to be corporations at all. If investors don't like the "double-taxation" problem, then drop the incorporation and use a different entity. Of course, they would loose the benefits of incorporation (i.e. limited liability) -- clearly many investors find that benefit worth the tax cost.

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