The web's full of stuff,
most of it emotional
and political.
To my eyes, the most
rational assessment came
from the left-wing Slate:
"... The chief argument of those who advocate eliminating taxes on dividends is that they are subject to "double taxation." Shareholders pay taxes on dividends at the rate their ordinary income is taxed. And corporations cannot deduct dividends from their taxable income, meaning they pay taxes on them, too. Does that mean that dividends are double taxed? Only if you subscribe to the belief that corporations don't pay taxes, people do. Under this theory, since a company's profits are ultimately distributed to owners and shareholders in some form—dividends, profit sharing, salaries, or capital gains—any tax on corporate income, or any limits on the deductibility of items from taxable income, in effect taxes the same dollar of profits twice. This only makes sense if, like Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, you don't draw a distinction between a corporation and the people who own it. "The corporations and businesses are just an intermediary between the citizens and the government," he said in an interview last year. (The logic of this dogma naturally leads its faithful to advocate abolishing the corporate income tax, as O'Neill does.)There were lots of threads,
"But the double-taxation argument reflects a flawed understanding of what corporations do and why they are formed. Corporations are distinct entities. They are not merely passive conduits of cash. They are legal beings, chartered by states to perform certain objectives. They possess all sorts of prerogatives, rights, and protections not afforded to individuals. That's why people form corporations, and that's why it is just for corporations to pay taxes on their income. Too frequently, CEOs like O'Neill have failed to differentiate between themselves as individual citizens and the companies they run. (That may explain why Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Enron's Kenneth Lay thought there was nothing untoward about using their corporate treasuries as ATM machines.) ..."
[The Dividend Double-Tax Deception, By Daniel Gross, Aug. 8, 2002]