Excise taxes are effectively sales tax but only on specific products. This is less economically efficient than broad-based taxes unless the thing you're taxing is something you're specifically trying to discourage (e.g. cigarettes) rather than having the purpose of generating revenue, but since 1955 the government has become more inclined to ban things it doesn't like than tax them.

In a global economy higher business taxes just cause large international corporations to incorporate in a different jurisdiction, which gives them an advantage over smaller purely domestic corporations, which is bad.

Social Security is already taking in less money than it's paying out. Reducing the Social Security tax would imply reducing Social Security benefits, since that's where it goes, unless you're proposing a more significant reform of the system in general.

The size of corporations and the amount they're taxed are two entirely different things. Indeed, the tax code does a lot of things to encourage corporations to be larger, like taxing dividends and capital gains after corporate income has already been taxed, which creates a tax preference for leaving the money inside of an existing corporation rather than investing it in starting a new competitor.

> In a global economy higher business taxes just cause large international corporations to incorporate in a different jurisdiction, which gives them an advantage over smaller purely domestic corporations, which is bad.

This is the common wisdom. I doubt it. The legal system in the USA is worth paying for. If these companies really want to submit to European law, then, they're welcome to it. I don't think that loss actually hurts domestic businesses but helps the massively.

Companies are subject to the laws in all the places they do business. They pay income tax in the place they have net income, which is something that they control themselves.

Corporate income tax is essentially designed wrong. Property tax is where the buildings are, payroll tax is where the workers are, sales tax is where the customers are, corporate income tax is where the profit is. Which they just put in the country with the lowest taxes.

It's basically this: Employees in the US get paid $1B to design a product that employees in China get paid $1B to manufacture and then it gets sold to customers in Europe for $3B. The net profit is then $1B, but where is it? If the subsidiary in Ireland pays the subsidiary in California $2B for the design then it's in California. If they instead pay the subsidiary in Shenzhen $2B to manufacture it then it's in China. If they instead pay them each $1B then it stays in Ireland. And then the company picks based on whichever one has lower taxes.

There is no real way around this because in real arms length negotiations it would depend on which subsidiary has more leverage against the others, but in modern companies what that really comes from is the strength of the company's brand or customer lock-in as a result of patents or copyrights, since without them the profit would be negligible because there would be no barriers to competitors entering the market and causing razor-thin margins, but all of those things are easy to move into whatever jurisdiction you like since they only exist on paper.

So international corporations pay taxes in Ireland and purely domestic corporations pay taxes in California which puts the domestic corporations at a disadvantage when the taxes in California are higher.

To get accurate numbers you need to scale either the before or after numbers to reflect changes in the effective overall tax rate over the time period.

You also need to look at overall tax burden, not just federal. It used to be that the states levied taxes and did stuff. Now mostly what happens is that the feds levy taxes and piss it back onto the states in the form of grants to do qualifying stuff.

IDK how this distorts the percentages but it certainly does.

I disagree. This is a way of looking at _where_ the government funding comes from or it's a way at looking at the _share_ of burden by source. The overall tax rates don't actually matter in this case and only implicate how that share is distributed within the group.

The point I'm trying to make is businesses used to carry a more significant fraction of federal spending during a period where they had less overall influence relative to the citizen.

Now we're inverted. Businesses have excepted themselves from most of the costs leaving that burden to the citizen, but we live in a country where business needs are put well ahead of the citizens.

The bigger picture is what matters here.