Thanks a ton for your substantial engagements with this, Larks. Like you, I might spread my replies out across a few posts to atomize my replies.
I think this is a bit of a strawman. While it is true that many people don’t understand tax incidence and falsely assume the burden falls entirely on shareholders rather than workers and consumers, the main argument for the optimality of a 0% corporate tax rate is Chamley-Judd (see for example here) and related results. (There are some informal descriptions of the result here and here.) The argument is about disincentives to invest reducing long-run growth and thereby making everyone poorer, not a short-term distributional effect. (The standard counter-argument to Chamley Judd, as far as I know, is to effectively apply lots of temporal discounting, but this is not available to longtermist EAs).
Thanks for this. TBQH, I was primarily familiar with the concerns cited as the reasons for opposition to corporate income taxation. I do wish in retrospect I had been able to get more acquainted with the anti-corporate-tax literature like you cited. Since I’m not an economist, I was not aware of and wasn’t able to find some of the sources you cited. I agree that they make good points not adequately addressed by the Report.
For some more recent discussion in favor of capital taxation, see Korinek (2019). Admittedly, it’s not clear how much this supports the WC because it does not necessarily target rents or fixed factors.
Thanks a ton for your substantial engagements with this, Larks. Like you, I might spread my replies out across a few posts to atomize my replies.
Thanks for this. TBQH, I was primarily familiar with the concerns cited as the reasons for opposition to corporate income taxation. I do wish in retrospect I had been able to get more acquainted with the anti-corporate-tax literature like you cited. Since I’m not an economist, I was not aware of and wasn’t able to find some of the sources you cited. I agree that they make good points not adequately addressed by the Report.
For some more recent discussion in favor of capital taxation, see Korinek (2019). Admittedly, it’s not clear how much this supports the WC because it does not necessarily target rents or fixed factors.