Corporations Have the Legal Rights of People. So, What If People Had the Rights of Corporations?

There has been considerable discord about the role of the corporations vis a vis the nation state. Corporations, especially in the US, are claiming that US citizenship puts them at a competitive disadvantage based on their allegedly punitive tax burden.

That they will be quick to call, nay, to demand government support should they even sense a whiff of foreign meddling in their affairs is besides the point. To them. This is about global domination.

So, rather than whining about all the benefits that corporations get from claiming the rights and freedoms of people -the subsidies, the regulatory free pass, the tax breaks - maybe, as the following article suggests, the entire economy would be better off if individuals simply demand the privileges accorded corporations.

Healthcare, housing costs, education benefits and other tangible or intangible assets could all be sheltered so that the returns from those assets could be deployed in a productive fashion designed to assure the greater benefit to society. And maybe just a bit off the top for ourselves...JL

Catherine Rampell comments in the Washington Post:

“Checked the tax code,” wrote a friend who’s engaged to a woman from a low-tax country. “Unfortunately, marrying [my fiancee] does not entitle me to a tax inversion like the big US companies are getting. Thanks for nothing IRS.”
That got me thinking. Maybe we’ve been looking at this whole corporations-are-people-too foofaraw the wrong way. Critics complained when the Supreme Court granted companies rights to freedom of speech and religion under the legal fiction that corporations are people. But perhaps this precedent is good news for flesh-and-blood people like you and me (a.k.a. People Classic™). If companies are claiming the rights and privileges of people, maybe people should start claiming the rights and privileges of corporations. Rights harmonization, in other words, should flow in both directions, since we’re now all indistinguishable, equally protected “persons” — in the court’s eyes, anyway.

I spoke with a few legal and tax experts about what we humans stand to gain from my cutting-edge constitutional insight. Turns out corporations enjoy tons of rights and privileges that biological beings should be salivating over.

The most obvious place to start is taxes. Companies save billions from loopholes that don’t apply to individuals — yet.

People, for example, pay taxes on their worldwide incomes. Corporations do not, as long as they don’t bring the foreign profits back into the United States. And tax attorneys have come up with clever ways of booking an unexpectedly high share of corporate income abroad.

Businesses, for example, can transfer their “intangible” property — things like patents or trademarks — to holding companies in tax havens. That means a company such as Apple could assign ownership of its patents to a subsidiary in Bermuda, and any profits resulting from those patents would get taxed in Bermuda only. Unless and until those profits were repatriated to the States, Uncle Sam wouldn’t get a cut.

If you think about it, humans have valuable intangible assets, too. Take, for instance, a college degree.

According to Martin Sullivan, the chief economist at Tax Analysts, if individuals were treated like corporations, I could set up an affiliate called “Catherine Rampell Bermuda,” have it pay my college tuition and then declare that the affiliate owns the resulting degree. I could then tell the IRS that everything I earn above the average high school grad’s wage should be recorded as income in Bermuda, since it’s all derived from a Bermuda-based asset. Until I decide to repatriate those diploma-derived earnings, I’ve built myself a tax-free IRA.

Other goodies abound. On federal tax returns, individuals can deduct either the sales taxes they paid or their state income taxes, not both; for companies, these deductions are all-you-can-eat. If people were treated like companies, we could also start deducting the first dollar we spend on health care, rather than just the medical spending that exceeds 10 percent of our adjusted gross incomes.

Home-buying would also become more attractive. Right now there are limits to how much mortgage interest humans can deduct. But if you analogize your primary residence to a “corporate headquarters” and your vacation homes to “branch offices,” you can deduct the full interest on every McMansion you ever buy.