On February 19, 2013, Bruce Bartlett writes in The New York Times:
The United States has had a corporate income tax since 1909, but in all the years since there is a major question about it that economists haven’t been able to answer satisfactorily: who pays it? The possibility that Congress may act on corporate tax reform this year makes this a highly salient question.
The problem, of course, is that people must ultimately pay all taxes. Corporations,contrary to the views of some Republicans, are not people. They are legal entities that exist only because governments permit them to and are artificial vehicles through which sales, wages and profits flow. Hence, the actual burden of the corporate tax may fall on any of the groups that receive such flows; namely, customers, workers and shareholders, the ultimate owners of the corporation.
See http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=6641 for my Congressional testimony on Tax Reform, which addresses the necessity for economic policy to stimulate growth.
Significantly no progress has been made over the course of the past 40 years since I testified before the United States Congress on the subject of Tax Reform. With slight modifications this could be presented today and is an early foundation to the advocacy of the Just Third Way and the Capital Homestead Act, whose economic component is to broaden private, individual ownership of income-producing productive capital assets. Back in 1973 we advocated the national movement as “a quiet revolution” for economic justice, tax equity, and governmental responsibility. The Master Plan Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement is at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/who-pays-the-corporate-income-tax/?smid=fb-share
