Corporations...and People

In the controversial 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission United States Supreme Court decision, the Court's majority decided with the plaintiff and in so doing, overturned more than a century of precedent law that distinguishes corporations from individuals when it comes to the expression of speech.  Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion, justified his position by stating that associations of people were just as protected by the First Amendment as were individuals and offered his own precedents for this view...opening the way for just about any shadow organization to now anonymously funnel millions of dollars into political advertising for targeted elections...thus in the eyes of the decision's critics, unduly influencing...even corrupting...the election process.  What I think is important here is the equating...in the minds of the conservative justices rendering the majority decision...of corporations with individual people...

That was 2010...fast forward to now, in early 2017.  The Trump administration says it wants to reform our tax code, in great part because the American corporate tax rate, at 38% when including average state and local corporate taxes, is the highest in the world and discourages our businesses from remaining here and encourages them to relocate abroad.  But liberal critics of any plan to lower the corporate tax rate to bring it more in line with other countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, or Germany...all of which have drastically lower corporate rates...invariably refer to this endeavor as trying to give tax breaks to rich people.  About which they're right, in a meaningful way, but in making this argument these liberals are in essence doing what they complain that the conservative justices did in Citizens United: equating corporations with individual people...

Of course, a corporation is not a person...else they'd be allowed to vote as well as run for public office.  Justice Stevens, in his dissenting opinion in Citizens United, emphasized the important longstanding legal separations between corporations and humans while also questioning the rationale of exactly who it is that a corporation is "speaking" for: its shareholders, CEOs...who?  And I'll add: if the shareholders are not American citizens, then does a corporation's "free speech", through its political spending, pose the danger of foreign interference in our elections?   Well, I guess you can see that a whole can of worms has been opened up with the decision from seven years back...but it would also behoove those arguing against our new president's tax goals to clearly distinguish between corporate and individual tax rates when making those arguments...