People

James Pethokoukis | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.com: "Now I don’t think Romney was making a legal argument about corporate personhood, which is well established concept in US law:

In the United States, corporations were recognized as having rights to contract, and to have those contracts honored the same as contracts entered into by natural persons, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, decided in 1819. In the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, the Supreme Court recognized that corporations were recognized as persons for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment

Rather, I am pretty sure he was trying to say that corporations are made up of people, but not in a Soylent Green sort of way. Rather they are comprised of workers generating goods and services for customers. And when you punish corporations, you punish workers and shareholders and customers. A few additional points:

1) Here an interesting bit from an OECD paper on taxes and economic growth

Corporate taxes are found to be most harmful for growth, followed by personal income taxes, and then consumption taxes. …"

Never mind that if a corporation can't charge enough for its products to end up with a net profit sufficient to sustain itself and attract continuing investment then it can't survive. By definition the gozintas have to be greater than the gozoutas. Taxes are just one more ingredient in the gozoutas that have to be covered by prices charged. It doesn't matter that taxes are ostensibly taken from the gross profit. Investors focus on net profitability. That's what their return is...