Thoughts on the Future Of the State Corporate Income Tax

Several commentators recently have suggested that the state corporate income tax is dead, or nearly so, and hardly worth keeping. Writing in these pages, Kirk J. Stark has concluded, after an extensive and thoughtful review of the history of the state corporate tax, that “subnational taxation of corporate income is simply untenable.”[1] Stark suggests that Congress should prohibit the states from levying a corporate income tax on multistate businesses, a…