Corporations are not "persons"!

Corporations are not “persons”, they are legal entities.  That is a fact that anybody with a normal IQ can easily see and understand.  Money is not speech.  Again, no normal person thinks otherwise.  

Unfortunately, activist extremist judges like Samuel Alito and John Roberts, as well as several judges before them have bastardized the legal definitions of these simple concepts almost beyond recognition.

When we grant to corporations human rights, we are in effect providing unequal (more) rights to the owners of the corporation than we grant to non-owners.  Each individual person already has his or her own constitutional rights.  But if a corporation has "rights" too then the owners of the corporation have their own rights, and also their share of the corporate rights.  This is unequal treatment under the law.  This is better treatment for rich people than for everyone else.

As to money and speech, I will start by quoting former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens:

“While money is used to finance speech, money is not speech. Speech is only one of the activities that are financed by campaign contributions and expenditures. Those financial activities should not receive the same constitutional protection as speech itself. After all, campaign funds were used to finance the Watergate burglaries — actions that clearly were not protected by the First Amendment.” - Justice Stevens before the Senate Rules Committee, April 30, 2014

So while speech is speech, and money might be used to promote speech, money is also a whole host of other things too.  The United States Constitution guarantees the freedom of speech, not all the activities one can engage in using money.

Please support a Constitutional Amendment to define corporations as legal entities with no innate rights, and distinguish between speech and money.  My favorite is MoveToAmend.org

What's wrong with the way we tax corporations?

Corporate taxes are all based on profits (sales minus expenses).  That may make some sense, but the logic has a huge hole in it, and is not how you and I are taxed personally.  It certainly makes no sense for the tax policies created for domestic manufacturing to apply to things manufactured elsewhere and of foreign materials.

You and I are taxed first based on our incomes, with certain allowances based on the number of kids we have, the amount we donate to charity, and the amount of interest we pay on our mortgage.  (There are other types of tax deductions but not many people get those as the limits are so high).  When we allow people to get tax deductions like this we are saying that as a society, we value these things so much that we are willing to make up the difference out of our own pockets.  You pay a higher tax rate (say, 15% instead of 14%) so that I can get a deduction for my mortgage, kids, etc., and I do the same for you.   You and I also pay sales tax on pretty much everything we buy.  It does not matter what our income is or what our expenses are, we pay sales tax no matter what.

Corporations pay sales tax too, but then they deduct the cost of the goods AND the cost of the sales tax they paid from their profits, hugely reducing their tax burden.  And we make up the difference out of our own pockets.  When it comes to corporate salaries paid to workers we give tax benefits (allow tax deductions) for the salaries paid out.  By doing this we are saying that we think this function is so valuable that we are willing to make up the difference out of our own pockets (through our personal income tax rates).  We want to incent corporations to hire us, and we are willing to give them big tax breaks to do so.  But why should we do that for salaries paid out to foreign workers?  This is the big hole. Why should I pay higher personal taxes so that EMC can pay their workers in Ireland to build disk drives?  And why should I pay higher personal taxes so that Apple can pay Foxcon to pay their workers in China? 
  

The whole corporate tax thing is just completely wrong, and that perpetuates the rich (generalizing here, but those who own corporations or have large stock holdings in them) getting richer while everyone else struggles to keep their head above water.  I hear a lot of griping from politicians in the media that "The United States has the highest corporate tax rates in the world."  Notice they never say "effective tax rates".  But lets say it really is true and our rates are the highest.  So let's cut our DOMESTIC corporate tax rate by 25%, but ELIMINATE corporate tax deductions for all goods, services, and salaries paid to entities outside the US.  It is only fair, and would be the patriotic thing to do.