I'm not in favor of corporate taxes for practical reasons--I think they're too hard to make work in an international setting. That said, it is not necessarily the case that taxes on corporate profits are passed on to consumers through higher product prices.
At always comes back to prices being the equilibrium of supply and demand. Taxes on corporate profits obviously have no impact on demand, so we must look at supply. Does taxing corporate profits reduce the amount of supply producers are able to put onto the market at a particular price? In a totally competitive market, profits approach a marginal amount and there is very little to tax anyway. So what about not perfectly competitive markets? If you tax Apple 10% of their profits instead of 5%, does that reduce the number of iPhones they are willing to supply at any given price? If taxes are applied uniformly through all industries, so that Apple can't get a lower tax rate by going into a different industry, then not really.
This is of course a very simplistic analysis. You have to consider things like elasticity of demand, etc. But basically, you can't ignore supply and demand. If you raise prices, quantity demanded will go down, and so the profit-maximizing price is not necessarily or even usually one in which the consumer bears the full amount of the tax.
I think Apple would offshore more and more businesses as every other large companies who can afford to has been doing for decades now. And that I think is always the problem with simply raising more corporate taxes in US.
As you raise more corporate tax in US, doing business in US becomes less and less attractive. As business move away from US, there will be less and less jobs in US. This already and undeniably happened with manufacturing sector. Unfortunately, people are now again arguing for increasing more taxes in US which will further lead to more business moving their business to other countries.
Right, I think practical reasons militate towards eliminating corporate taxes and shifting the burden to capital gains taxes. A number of companies have recently reincorporated from the U.S. to high-tax (but low corporate tax) jurisdictions like the U.K. and Switzerland. Companies have shown that they don't care about forcing their executives to move to jurisdictions with high personal income taxes, if they can get the benefit of lower corporate taxes to show higher earnings per share.
Not just in an international setting. Even in a closed universe it's a lot more difficult to measure, or even define, profit than revenue. Although they are both called income tax, individuals are largely taxed on income, corporations on profit.
Better would be trying to tax the beneficiaries of the corporation. The best measure of profitability is some benefit to the owner. Usually capital appreciation or dividends, but sometimes outsize cash or non-cash compensation in an employee context, or as a non-arms length counterparty.
Increase the dividend and capital gains* rates substantially, start taxing fringe benefits, transform the corporate income tax into a very small tax on revenue to prevent the multiplication of corporate entities, crack down on people who renounce US citizenship (by for example making them inadmissible) and call it a day.
*Also eliminate the capital gains basis reset when assets are transferred at death. That makes no sense at all.
Profits are also a cushion for the future years when the sales are not that great, and the company has to dip into its savings account or force layoffs and trim product offerings.
While high corporate taxation environment is great for boom years (unless your corporate constituents relocate), it necessitates bailouts during the bad years. Good example would be some European socialist economies overly reliant on state enterprises.
At always comes back to prices being the equilibrium of supply and demand. Taxes on corporate profits obviously have no impact on demand, so we must look at supply. Does taxing corporate profits reduce the amount of supply producers are able to put onto the market at a particular price? In a totally competitive market, profits approach a marginal amount and there is very little to tax anyway. So what about not perfectly competitive markets? If you tax Apple 10% of their profits instead of 5%, does that reduce the number of iPhones they are willing to supply at any given price? If taxes are applied uniformly through all industries, so that Apple can't get a lower tax rate by going into a different industry, then not really.
This is of course a very simplistic analysis. You have to consider things like elasticity of demand, etc. But basically, you can't ignore supply and demand. If you raise prices, quantity demanded will go down, and so the profit-maximizing price is not necessarily or even usually one in which the consumer bears the full amount of the tax.