Corporate taxes are blunt instruments. They preferentially hurt workers. The C-suite decides how higher corporate taxes affect the company, and it’s not by lowering the CEO’s salary. It’s by firing people, hiring less, and making less investments in the business all else being equal. Corporate taxes also distort decisions of small business owners, who will pay out profits as salary to themselves rather than reinvesting the money in the company so as to avoid paying taxes on profits twice, first as a corporate tax and the second time as an income tax.

A better solution is to slash corporate taxes and raise income taxes on high earners. This will end the practice of offshoring the story describes, and also spare workers the negative effects of corporate income taxes.

> It’s by firing people, hiring less, and making less investments in the business all else being equal.

This is farcical. The universal response to higher taxes is to create less revenue? Exactly how does this benefit the CEOs salary? Or improve outcomes for shareholders?

> who will pay out profits as salary to themselves rather than reinvesting the money in the company so as to avoid paying taxes on profits twice

The IRS keeps an eye on this. The business owner does not have unlimited runway and the salary selected must be reasonable. It's also not the only tax vehicle available to the owner to reduce or eliminate the "double taxation" that can occur on profit distributions. There's like half a dozen ways to solve this problem from an ownership perspective.

It should also be noted that the personal income tax rate and the capital gains tax rate are likely to offer very different outcomes for the owner. It's hardly as cut and dry as you project.

> A better solution is to slash corporate taxes and raise income taxes on high earners.

So the corporations engage in practices like buybacks and overfund the business and workers wages end up artificially depressed?

A better solution is to examine the problem and respond with appropriately designed policies that are outcome oriented. These "quick fix" and "slash and burn" policies are _precisely_ how we ended up here. Swinging the pendulum all the way to the other extreme creates the same amount of misery just in a different direction.

Australia has another (strange?) solution: Australian public companies pay tax and issue dividends to shareholders. these dividend payments have attached tax credits ("franking credits") that can be used by the shareholder to reduce their income tax, so those dividend payments are not subject to double taxation (being subject to company tax and again to the individual shareholder's income tax).

E.g. suppose you are a shareholder and receive a dividend of $1000 from some australian public company. If the australian company is large it will be subject to a 30% corporate tax rate. If the company paid company tax on earnings before issuing the dividend, then that dividend comes with a $(1000 / 0.7) * 0.3 = $428.57 tax credit which the shareholder can use to reduce their income tax bill.

That said, in terms of the global landscape of low tax jurisdictions, Australia's corporate tax rate of 30% and highest marginal individual income tax rate of 47% make things less attractive.