Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

I figure Mark Halperin is useful for letting us know what the current DC conventional wisdom is, and today he says that the business community’s love affair with Barack Obama is over. To be honest, I thought it was over sometime around January 21st of last year, but what do I know? In any case, Halperin writes that not only do the nation’s CEOs hate the White House, but things are still going downhill:

The President’s current priorities are all liable to make a now bad relationship that much worse. The financial regulation bill is viewed as a typically ignorant Washington overreach. The ongoing efforts to deal with the BP spill are seen as proof that Obama is an incompetent manager and serial scapegoater of large corporate interests. And the attempt to use the Gulf crisis to revive the stalled effort to get Congress to pass major energy legislation appears to many business types as a backdoor gambit to raise taxes on corporations, mom-and-pop enterprises and consumers.

Even by bizarro standards I don’t get the “scapegoater of large corporate interests” thing at all. Is the business community upset that Obama is blaming BP for a blowout at BP’s oil platform? Or what?

But forget that. The other two items suggest a way to take those business lemons and make lemonade out of them. Here’s my idea: Obama should propose that the corporate income tax be abolished completely, to be replaced by a carbon tax and a financial services tax. And then sit back and see what happens.

Here’s the pitch: corporate income taxes are a drag on businesses and are ultimately paid by consumers anyway. That’s bad. Conversely, a tax on carbon would reduce our oil use and spur energy efficiency. That’s good! Likewise, a tax on financial transactions would reduce speculative volatility and help stabilize the financial sector. Also good! So we’d trade one bad tax for two good Pigovian taxes.

What’s more, although receipts from the corporate income tax are down right now thanks to the recession, within a couple of years they should be back up to around $400 billion a year. A financial services tax is probably worth around $100 billion a year, give or take, and that means we’d need a carbon tax of around $300 billion to keep everything revenue neutral. This is far higher than anything we could dream of without the grand corporate income tax bargain and holds out hope of being big enough to actually make a difference.

Am I serious about this? Why not? Everyone should love it. Taxing carbon and financial speculation is a lot more useful than taxing business activity, and I imagine the boffins on the appropriate committees could figure out ways to keep the distributional impacts fairly small. And getting rid of the corporate income tax would not only make business owners deliriously happy (or should, anyway), but it would remove forever Congress’s ability to provide quiet subsidies and corporate welfare handouts for their buddies. Conventional wisdom says that the corporate tax code needs to be seriously overhauled every few decades, but why bother? Why not get rid of it altogether instead?

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate