NPR’s “Planet Money“‘s Adam Davidson:

Businesses are easy targets, but taxing them — or not taxing them — isn’t the answer. If you can ignore the politics and look at our country’s fiscal picture as a math problem, the situation is fairly grim, but it’s also fairly clear.

I seem to recall some coked up math-econ students cornering me at a party one time trying to tell me the same thing. ‘If you’re good enough at math, then you can win at economics.’ So I guess those Einsteins at Bear Stearns just forgot their slide rules for a couple, two, three months and their bank just accidentally blew up?

Most people who study the issue agree that the top federal corporate tax rate (35 percent of profits) is simply too high.

For a supposedly data-driven economist, the meat of your argument seems to lay in “private conversations”, Planet Money podcast interviews, and a slew of Republican presidential candidates’ platforms. But ok. I’ll grant this.

few large companies pay anything close to 35 percent. Multinationals avoid taxes by moving profits around their global subsidiaries. U.S.-based businesses hire huge teams of lawyers to navigate motley tax laws and widen every loophole

WHAT!? I just granted you that 35% was too high for corporate taxes, and now you’re saying that corporations don’t even pay that much? How am I ever supposed to trust your argument, if you score some major ‘counter-intuitive emotional points’, and then you just squander them on ‘disingenuous political exigencies’. That was a terrible move.

Anyway, I think we can all agree, NPR and NYT, that corporations need to pay more taxes!, right?

if we eliminated all corporate taxes, the extra $250 billion per year at the companies’ disposal wouldn’t be enough to make our $14 trillion economy grow.

Oh. Shoot, I thought we were all together on that one. So I guess that means we should do that? Or not do that? It kind of sounds like you’re saying that the corporate influence on our nation’s bottom line is kind of negligible? Ok, I will keep this in mind.

But since the millionaires already pay close to $200 billion in taxes, the government would have to increase rates to nearly 100 percent — which is about the worst idea ever — for it to have any real impact.

Wait wait wait wait what?! I thought you just said that it doesn’t even matter how much corporations pay in taxes. Oh… now we’re talking about millionaires: the people drawing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in vested stock options and other sources of non-income that pay off at a lower tax rate. I’m not sure why it would be a worse idea for millionaires to pay more taxes but not for corporations. Plus, didn’t you just say that the $250 billion paid by corporations does basically nothing? So why would a 100% on $200 billion (ie, $200 billion, which is 20% less than the figure you cited…) be “the worst idea ever”?

To solve our debt problems, we have to go to where the money is — the middle class.

Oh. Shit. Yes, I forgot. Yes. Millionaires and ‘giant corporations’ have nothing to contribute, money-wise, to America. Your economist-math has just seen more clearly that the really super rich people don’t have enough money to accomplish anything in America. I did not see that coming. Did I just get freakonomics’d?

People who earn between $30,000 and $200,000 a year make a total of around $5 trillion and pay less than 10 percent of that in taxes.

“Less than 10 percent of that in taxes” !??!?!! I am OUTRAGED! How dare the majority of America pay, let’s see…, carry the one, remember the decimal point… $500 billion! On the one hand, you see a lot of your run-of-the-mill $30,000 to $200,000 earner hitting hard times. Foreclosures, debt collectors, even just, like, not going on that two week vacation. And still, as an anonymous figure on a spreadsheet, this cohort pays $500 billion in taxes. Which I guess you’d sort of expect. But millionaires — and I’m sure there are, I guess, struggling millionaires out there — have the power to pay 40% of the taxes of the rest of America. That’s pretty amazing.

(My main moral argument against this section is that Davidson tries to make the numbers do rhetoric. “$5 trillion” “less than 10 percent” Those figures sound persuasive: that’s a lot of money… 10% is not much, but when you just say $500 billion, it’s well within the ballpark of the corporate/millionaire numbers he was throwing around earlier.)

But, well, ok. Let’s be rational. Reading through the piece, it does make a lot of sense. There are a lot more middle classers than there are millionaires, so you want to distribute the cost among this larger group. It hurts less. That does sound kind of like ‘reverse-socialism’ to me, though. Or, like an oligarchy. It’s kind of messed up. Anyhoo, it might not be as bad as it seems, because:

Still, many experts say we don’t need to raise the tax rate on the middle class; we just need to get rid of some of those despised loopholes (or beloved incentives).

OH SHIT! Now I’m mad. So we’ll just take as given that corporate tax loopholes and offshore accounting are here to stay, but you want the middle class to give up its loopholes and incentives?! Like Social Security and Medicare?

“Ha. Ha. Ha. Sorry poor person, but I’m closing your loophole on being alive. I have to cut your Medicare benefits. I would have cut corporate welfare, but you know, millionares have to so tough.”

So fuck the New York Times, NPR, “Planet Money”, and especially Adam Davidson. I’m never listening to your smarmy weasel voice ever again.