It should be zero. Then tax individuals what you’ll tax them. Corporations are made up of individuals. The main argument for high corporate taxes seems to be based on envy, the building block of the Democrat party.
Corporations are legal persons.
Under law, they have legal personhood. Under Supreme Court rulings, that grants them all the rights of individuals.
They also have a number of special privileges and rights that “real” people don’t. For instance, if you or I committed the crimes that say, ADM did in the 1990’s, our property and holdings would be taken, and our freedom would be also. ADM, while they paid a fine, kept doing business.
Also, they get huge pay outs from Federal, state, and local governments. Elon Musk has never turned a profit in Tesla, and (if you believe the statements) Amazon does not either. Yet they get plumb contracts, massive tax incentives, and laws written to benefit them at the expense of their competitors and ‘customers” (which are not those who buy the services or products).
Corporations also have been given dispensation for numerous laws that you and I have to follow. For instance, a mercenary company has a training facility across the river in Illinois. They have fully automatic weapons, crew served weapons, light helicopter gunships, and armor. All granted to the legal person that is the corporation, while a citizen of Illinois does not have a fraction of those rights.
So what you are saying is that we have two systems of law. One for the nobility (of which those legal persons called corporations are a part) and one for the rest (which are those living persons and those corporations without the money to buy their way into the trough).
IF a corporation is a legal person, which under law they claim to be, THEN actually treat them under the law as a person. Tax, regulate, and enforce the same rules for all persons, not just those who have no influence.
I used to think as you do, till I had the good fortune to see how things are done. We don’t have a free market, we having since the late 1800’s. The large corporations of today pay out huge amounts of money to buy political influence, forced payouts, and to limit competition.
So no, the tax rate shouldn’t be zero. A corporation like Walmart, which structures its pay scale so most of its employees are on welfare, costs me money if I shop their or not. A firm like GM, who bellied up to bench and demanded that Bush give them my money by the point of a gun even though I will never drive another GM care again, has no sympathy from me.
If they want to be treated as legal people, they then can deal with the down side as well as the up. Setting the rate to zero would actually hurt the economy, because my (and I suspect your) taxes would go up dramatically, while the companies would not expand. Corporations don’t hire people because they make money. They don’t increase wages for those below the E class based on profit either. They only expand, or give raises, or hire, if they feel it will benefit them.
Trust me. A company with a sudden increase in profit margin will not just go out and give raises to everyone. They will be “consulted” to do the opposite. Because if you made X profit with Y people, if you cut 10% you could make even MORE profit! And if that doesn’t work, you lobby the government for a handout!
This tax bill will end up costing a lot. It will increase my taxes (because I am of the powerless class that pays taxes). It will end up costing the GOP a lot of seats in Congress (because the only thing they can seem to do is give out tax cuts to large corporations and tax hikes to the middle class, Where is my wall BTW?) And in the end, it will hurt the economy just like the bail outs did in 2008.