Re: SimplE tax rules
This helps how exactly? Today, corporations manipulate their business deals and accounting practices to make them look more profitable than they are so that idiots will overpay for the stock and the big bosses can cash in on their restricted shares and options. They do this by reporting a separate set of metrics that they've colluded with Wall Street "analysts" to get the market to decide are "more meaningful" than GAAP or other national/international accounting rules provide. Then they pay taxes based on their GAAP numbers, which are almost always much lower, less whatever collection of corporate welfare, subsidies, and loopholes allow.
Under your system, they would instead manipulate all these things to guarantee that they never report any profits so that they can't be forcibly taken over at what would almost certainly be a tiny fraction of their fair market value (ignoring the insane speculative fervor that has shares that have never paid dividends and never will, representing ownership of corporations that have never turned a profit and never will, trading at valuations in the hundreds of billions).
If you want simple tax rules, you could start by wiping away all the credits, offsets, banked NOLs, subsidies, enterprise zones, opportunity funds, etc. Every corporation pays 22% of its GAAP profits less half of dividends paid to domestic owners (not all, because those are taxed at a lower rate already), period. If you then want to make it "more fair", you can also impose a minimum rate expressed as a percentage of revenue that applies to those who hide their profits in offshore subsidiaries, or you can just base the minimum on the total P&L of all subsidiaries combined.
Corporate tax is never going to be simple, but if you insist on taxing corporations (instead of their owners, who already have to pay taxes on the income they get from corporations), that's about as simple as you can make it. You'd find that far fewer legitimately profitable corporations end up owing no tax. Giving the state a free deep in the money call option on every corporation is a lot like prohibition of recreational drug use: it will create a thriving black market in cheats and schemes while doing less than nothing to address the original problem.
Take away the hiding places, level the playing field, then set the rate wherever it needs to be to fund the minimum level of government the people demand. If you eliminate lobbying, taxation really is just that simple.
