Whack-A-Politician

I think you're mistaken there, Leo. Google, Facebook and I grab a brewsky every other Friday (Google likes Bud Light, but Facebook's all about the micro-brew).

You have some interesting points, and I think there's an interesting debate to be had around whether or not corporations should be treated as people. There's also an interesting debate around money in politics. I'm going to take a little different angle, though, because I don't think that's what Romney was trying to say (although I may be mistaken, I skipped the last Republican mind-melding session because Dancing With The Stars was on). My take on the point he was making is that ultimately all the money that goes into a corporation ends up going to people, and therefore anything you do to impose higher costs on corporations will ultimately affect people.

Also, Romney didn't make the point, but I think it's also worth pointing out that the people most affected by those higher corporate costs won't be the wealthy billionaires running the big multi-nationals. Higher costs will get passed on to the middle-class consumers, and they will get passed on to the shareholders, the majority of whom are mutual funds and pensions (and a 10% loss to someone's retirement account is going to be a lot more impactful than a rich CEO who makes $90 million instead of $100 million). They will also disproportionately impact small businesses. Even if you focus higher costs toward the largest corporations you'll still end up squeezing the little guy because in many cases large corporations do a lot of business with small businesses and because of their size they're able to put pressure on those small suppliers to cut their margins to make up for higher costs elsewhere.

All that said, I'm not really going to defend our current corporate tax structure. We have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, yet our corporations pay one of the lowest percentages of net revenue, and there are lots of examples out there of corporations that made record profits and didn't pay any taxes. The problem is the system of tax incentives that we've created, where the government grants favoritism on some companies and tells them they don't have to pay their fair share. By doing that you not only have a system where some companies pay nothing and others pay at a usurious rate, but you also incentivize corporations to throw money into politics in order to get elected someone who will send the favoritism their way. If we were to instead lower our corporate tax rate to the same level as famously "low-tax" France or Sweden and pay for it by cutting all the special favors we'd not only have a tax structure that was more fair, I think we'd also see less intrusion of corporate money into politics.