In recent years, the Supreme Court has granted to corporations more and more rights, as if these corporations are people which seem absurd, though the counter-argument to that is corporations are made up of groups of people. Still, sometimes, one needs to be careful about what they ask for, because if legally we are to treat corporations as people, than logically, those same corporations should be taxed the same as people, that is, at the same individual tax rates, with the same set of rules.
For instance, as a person, when you have expenses such as meals, travel, gifts, insurance, maintenance, airfare, repair, entertainment, publications, internet, phone, postage, amongst many other things, none of these are typically deductible from your personal taxes, even though they are expenses to you. On the other hand, for corporations, most of those things are deductible from their income as an expense, in addition to corporations being able to depreciate capital equipment, as well as having a whole bunch of other stuff that is also classified to be legitimate business expenses, which is subtracted from the gross income of said corporation.
In other words, corporations, despite all their whining about tax codes and paying too much in taxes, are actually coddled by the American government, and are tax privileged, especially in comparison, to the general public, for where else, can someone wake up in the morning, receive a ride in a limousine, get on a private corporate jet, receive all sorts of perks and courtesies while traveling on that jet, take in a very expensive sporting event at a stadium while sitting in a private box and being catered to, eat at whatever exclusive restaurant that they so desire with as many guests as they prefer, and then bed at night at a high end hotel, and not have to pay a dime, directly or personally, and the corporation that this individual is part of, is able to basically expense or deduct these expenditures as being legitimate business expenses, from its corporate income
.
All of the tax advantages that corporations have over individuals, did not first exist, as part of the corporate tax code, but have evolved over the ensuring years as a way of benefiting these very powerful entities at the expense of individuals, that are subjected to onerous taxes, in which, the common taxpayer is the one that pays nearly half of all the US Federal taxes, in which as reported by topforeignstocks.com, in fiscal year 2014, individual income taxes paid 48.4% of Federal taxes, whereas corporate Federal taxes contributed just 9.9%. In fact, the last time that corporate Federal taxes were larger than individual Federal taxes, was 1943, and since that time the gap between the two has gotten larger and larger, for corporations are very adept at tax dodging as well as receiving tax subsidies, so that, corporations such as General Motors, E*Trade, and American Airlines, for fiscal year 2015, all had an income tax expense that was actually negative, despite their pre-tax profits of millions upon millions.
Corporations in today's America have never had it better, especially with the passage of recent tax legislation that lowered the federal corporate income tax rate from 35%, of which virtually no corporation ever paid, to 21%, which few corporations will actually pay at, which effectively means that the percentage of taxes that will be paid by corporations in comparison to individuals will drop even further, even though, corporations are legally, for some purposes, considered to be people.