Corporations are people. So what if people were corporations? By Catherine Rampell [View all]

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/catherine-rampell-people-should-claim-the-same-rights-as-companies/2014/07/24/460aea0c-135b-11e4-9285-4243a40ddc97_story.html

“Checked the tax code,” wrote a friend who’s engaged to a woman from a low-tax country. “Unfortunately, marrying [my fiancee] does not entitle me to a tax inversion like the big US companies are getting. Thanks for nothing IRS.”

That got me thinking. Maybe we’ve been looking at this whole corporations-are-people-too foofaraw the wrong way. Critics complained when the Supreme Court granted companies rights to freedom of speech and religion under the legal fiction that corporations are people. But perhaps this precedent is good news for flesh-and-blood people like you and me (a.k.a. People Classic™).

The most obvious place to start is taxes. Companies save billions from loopholes that don’t apply to individuals — yet.

People, for example, pay taxes on their worldwide incomes. Corporations do not, as long as they don’t bring the foreign profits back into the United States. And tax attorneys have come up with clever ways of booking an unexpectedly high share of corporate income abroad.

Home-buying would also become more attractive. Right now there are limits to how much mortgage interest humans can deduct. But if you analogize your primary residence to a “corporate headquarters” and your vacation homes to “branch offices,” you can deduct the full interest on every McMansion you ever buy.