Thanks for your comments.

During the 50s to70s, marginal tax rates across the west were quite high, probably about 90%. There's a story of a British entertainer in those times doing 400 gigs a year and essentially working for nothing after 100 gigs.

The graph that introduced my article is known as the Laffer curve. It summarizes studies that say for wealthy individuals, they start pulling out of the economy at a 70% tax rate.

The multi-national corporations have been playing a shell game for decades, finding interesting ways to move profits to the jurisdiction of the lowest tax rate. Accounting items like "management fees" meant a high-tax jurisdiction could essentially report no profit to the local taxman. Today the off-shore tax havens ensure taxes are 1% of profits or less.

The Regan/Thatcher era set up the shift in tax collections. But before that, there were still CEO's happy to be CEOs (even at a 90% rate) and corporations happy to pay a 40% tax if they were profitable.

Setting up new tax laws has proven futile. Big companies have incentive to challenge new laws and skirt around them.

I guess my long-term solution would be to have an arbitrary law that a tax inspector (or panel) can deem a taxable expense is more for tax minimization rather than a valid business expense, thus voiding that expense when calculating taxes. This would only apply to multinational firms with a certain revenue threshold.

The Laffer curve for corporate taxes is probably about 25%. But, unfortunately, today's multinationals have set up accounting structures not even to pay a 5% tax on profits. So they won't pay 25%.

But if we could force them to pay 25% (with that arbitrary law), they will still stick around.