One of Mel Brooks’ characters observed that “It’s good to be the King”. Well, in America, being the land of opportunity, you don’t need to be a king. Being a corporation will do.
Besides being entitled to all the perks of personhood, courtesy of the Supreme Court, you get to get to game the system in so many wonderful ways. Case in point in this morning’s Times. David Leonhardt calls it the Paradox of Corporate Taxes. What’s the paradox. Well, it lies in the fact that the United States has the highest nominal corporate tax rate in the world, and one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates, given the number of loopholes granted to the corporations by a compliant U.S. government.
This results in a best of both worlds situation for the corporations. They, along with their lobbyists and their (mostly) Republican Congressional supporters get to complain ceaselessly about high U.S. tax rates, using that complaint as a device to extract ever more loopholes, while enjoying the benefit of an actually very low tax rate (getting lower all the time as those loopholes accrue), which costs no more to get than the salaries of a few tax lawyers, a few lobbyists, and the occasional bribe to a Congressman, the latter of which comes incredibly cheap. Meanwhile we the real taxpayers, and the U.S. economy as a whole, gets the shaft.
It’s good to be a corporation.
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