The corporate income tax is a tax on the profits of corporations earning income in the United States. Across three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, host Bob Zadek and his guests treat the tax less as a levy on an institution than as a concealed levy on people, and they argue over where the burden finally lands. The excerpts present the tax as a recurring target of repeal proposals, a source of cronyism, and a shrinking contributor to federal revenue.
The tax and its incidence
Bob Zadek introduced the subject by describing the corporate income tax as a tax whose taxpayers are American corporations or corporations that earn income in the US, and he noted that an economist at Boston University had raised the issue of eliminating it in response to weak employment numbers How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014). Zadek’s central claim is that corporations cannot pay taxes: they write checks, but the expense is built into the sales price of the product, into the wages the business can afford to pay, and into the dividends it pays its owners. On that account, taxing a corporation is a decision to tax owners, workers, suppliers and creditors rather than the corporation itself.
Richard Rubin, in a later episode, agreed with the concept while adding detail. He described corporations as collections of shareholders, bondholders, employees, executives and to some extent customers, and said the corporate income tax is a tax on a business’s profits. The burden, he said, does not stay in the company; economists divide over whether it lands on capital or on labor. Government estimates put roughly three-quarters on the capital side and one-quarter on the labor side, while more conservative economists put it closer to even, with some arguing the short run leans toward capital and the long run toward labor Auditing the Corporate Income Tax (2021). Rubin also noted that shareholders tend to be wealthier and higher income than the population as a whole, but that stock ownership is widely distributed through 401(k)s, and that a big portion of corporate shareholders are foreigners.
Zadek extended that point to union pension funds and life insurance companies, arguing that because insurers sell to all economic strata, lower taxes on their investment income would over time be reflected in lower premiums. He invoked Frédéric Bastiat to say the tax falls on the unseen, and concluded that a president raising corporate taxes is secretly taxing workers and equity holders while hiding behind the political cover of taxing a corporation.
The case for repeal
In the 2014 episode, Zadek called the corporate income tax a job-killing statute and asked why it exists at all. His answer was that it is supported by political types, mostly on the left, who regard corporations as unpleasant economic entities, a home for the rich and a surrogate for the wealthy. He argued the tax is inefficient because businesses go to Congress seeking special tax breaks, making it a home for cronyism whose benefits voters rarely learn about.
Zadek also invoked the economics of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. A corporation might realize a $10 million benefit from a special tax break while the cost to each voter is four cents, so no one storms the Bastille over four cents while the corporation lobbies hard for the benefit. He added the principle that an old tax is a good tax: people have adjusted to a long-standing tax, and inertia diminishes the likelihood of change even when change would be beneficial.
Revenue and mobility
Chris Edwards, in the December 2020 episode, said that Biden proposed raising the corporate income tax along with higher rates on higher-income individuals, and warned that the spending promises could lead to a new broad-based tax on everyone, either a European-style value-added tax or a carbon tax Is it too late to step back from the edge of fiscal insanity? (2020). He framed the accumulated $20 trillion in federal debt as a cost moved forward onto young people, calling it a moral as well as an economic issue.
Edwards also supplied figures: the federal government in 2021 would raise $3.3 trillion in taxes, of which only $120 billion would come from corporations, because corporate profits are tiny compared to individual income and the corporate tax base is small and mobile. He argued that industry today is mobile, that a semiconductor plant can be set up in any of dozens of countries, and that raising taxes on corporations induces investment to go abroad. He called the rhetoric that corporate tax increases can fund spending total nonsense.
Zadek, in the same exchange, said the last politician to discuss eliminating the corporate income tax as a disguised tax on low-income consumers was Steve Forbes a long time ago, and that the lowest 25% of earners bear a disproportionately high burden of corporate taxation through the pass-through. He characterized the tax as cowardice because it taxes consumers indirectly without telling them.
Across episodes
The topic recurs across all three episodes with a consistent core claim — that corporations do not bear the tax — but the treatment shifts. The 2014 episode is Zadek’s solo exposition of pass-through and cronyism; the 2020 episode pairs Zadek with Chris Edwards on revenue figures and capital mobility; the 2021 episode pairs him with Richard Rubin, who supplies the capital-versus-labor split and the foreign-shareholder point. The later episodes add empirical texture — dollar figures, incidence estimates, the mobility of industry — to the earlier conceptual argument.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the statutory corporate rate, the name of any bill proposing its repeal, or the details of the 2017 tax change beyond Zadek’s reference to Donald Trump lowering the corporate income tax. They do not identify the Boston University economist’s article by title or date beyond Zadek’s description, and they do not report any legislative outcome. The 2021 excerpt ends mid-sentence, so Zadek’s closing thought in that episode is unavailable.