I halfway agree with you.
FWIW, the poor corps probably can survive just fine paying taxes but they'll sure get out of them any way they can, including moving offshore. Corporations are by nature sociopathic, even if they do an occasional good deed for PR purposes. There's a problem with our definition of corporate personhood even if it is enshrined in our law going back to the early 19th century.
But I'd even go so far as to say why not a 0% corporate tax rate couple with strongly progressive personal rates on all forms of income- earned, dividends and interest?
Retained earnings are either going to be invested in productive purposes or reduce debt (you would have to crack down on stock buybacks, which needs doing anyway). Or go out as dividends and then it is taxed a single time.
The stock is presumably worth something more if there's more earnings left over and if there's a dividend. Let ma and pa coupon clipper get a preferential rate on those forms of income up to say, $50,000. But ma and pa don't own that much of the market.
Above that, personal taxes kick in at say 50% above $1M on all forms of income- CGs, dividends, interest, earned.
A lot of benefits- higher productivity from the accumulated capital and more than anything, tends to reduce the incentive for destructive financial games.
I wouldn't sell this part too hard but might even be some of that improved efficiency and investment translate into wages for poor schlubs.
But at the end of the day that money is of better use to the economy being retained in the corporation than it is in buying Hamptons estates for the executives, board and "activist investors" like hedgies and PE operators. And if they want to do that they'd better have a pretty stupid bunch of shareholders because they're going to have to increase their comp by 50% to get to the same place.
