Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden thinks American businesses don’t pay enough taxes into Government’s coffers.

“Vice President Biden has been clear that it’s absolutely unacceptable for some of the biggest companies in America, like Amazon, to pay next to nothing in taxes,” Michael Gwin, a campaign spokesman, said.

This is a carefully misleading claim that Biden is making through his spokesman. Some of the biggest companies in America actually pay billions of dollars in taxes for all that each of those companies pay a net amount of close to zero. That, though, is an outcome of our byzantine tax code that lets companies—big and small; although it’s the biggest that are able to make the most of it—balance a tax bite here with a subsidy, write-off, credit, or what-have-you there in order to achieve low/zero overall liability while paying those individual billions.

Biden knows this full well. It is, after all, his Senate and his Obama-Biden administration (and far too many Republican Senates and administrations) that have set up our present tax system.

That aside, though, the real, underlying, problem is that business taxes hurt consumers and our economic performance, and higher taxes would damage us and our economy even more.

Nevertheless, Biden wants to eliminate those tax breaks and impose higher rates. And more: Biden wants to

impose a 15% minimum tax on profits reported to investors….

That alone would raise somewhere between $166 billion and $400 billion over the next 10 years. Another way to look at it is that this minimum tax would take between $166 billion and $400 billion out of our companies’ treasuries and consumers’ pockets over the next 10 years.

Money taken from a business reduces its ability to fund R&D, market research, improve physical plant, and pay workers more or pay more workers.

Compliance with business tax requirements is an additional cost imposed on each business, not naturally by market imperatives, but artificially by Government fiat—that tax code.

In the end, businesses don’t pay those taxes or compliance costs anyway. We taxpayers pay for the offsets—money out of our pockets—and we customer/consumers pay the taxes not completely covered by the myriad offsets, as well as those compliance costs, in the form of the higher prices businesses charge.

Even a simple Just Gimme the Damn Money tax code that Progressive-Democrats seem so badly to want would only reduce compliance costs (maybe—they’d demand their own proofs of compliance and of revenue). It would not reduce the money taken out of businesses’—or consumers’—pockets.