I'm going to pick at one particular part of your statement; since while I generally agree with your thrust of "normalize cap gains and income taxes", this stood out: "Given that taxes on corporate income is a direct tax in investment, it's counterproductive, it reduces investment, and productivity gains that increase both wages and wealth"
I've seen this stated in a few prior debates I've had on this topic, but I'd ask the rebuttal: Why can't you make that EXACT statement but s/corporate income/personal income/? I never understood why capital investment was more a focus than consumer demand, especially given well understood properties of both marginal spend for low vs high worth individuals (low income salary workers will spend more by % on goods and services than wealthy investors) and the assertion that we are "swimming in investor money" right now. (I see the long bull market, P/E ratios, VCs over the last decade/ICOs/wealth gap as datapoints)
I'm 100% sure someone in the finance world has already thought this through but I don't know the words to search for, and my own intuition suggests that supporting demand-side consumption is going to be a far better driver for true efficient allocations of funds and market growth to support a virtuous cycle of consumerism and employment than investor money will.
I think discussions like this often devolve into religious wars, but I'll take a shot at it.
If you have a village of a hundred of starving artisans and workers, but no crops because they have no seed corn, you have high demand, but no capital, and so no one gets fed. Consumer demand isn't enough.
To address demand, someone must invest in production. Lets assume that the entire village has earned seed corn by selling their pottery but has no farming land. The villagers can eat the seed corn, so they do. But one day farmer walks into town and offers to give anyone 10x their seed corn in return for it, if they can just wait one growing season.
So now consumption is converted into investment. The farmer must get investment to have production. If the villagers tell him to just farm his land and they'll pay him in pottery when his crops are ready for sale, it won't work.
Now if the farmer has lots of seed corn, but the villagers died of starvation waiting, he's got no customers. He needs demand to make his investment valuable, otherwise it can only feed him, and he'll never get pottery or any other goods from it.
Consumption is the benefit of investment, and it helps drive more investment, but it's not the direct creator of it. Now lets assume the village and the farmer reach equilibrium. He plants enough crops every year to feed all of them, and they make enough goods that it's worthwhile to him to do it. Everyone's standard of living can rise as the farmer more of his excess seed corn every year an reinvests it to farm bigger crops, and the well fed villagers compete to make better goods to earn more food.
Now the King decides to tax farming output at 99%. The farmer can plant enough to feed himself and keep all of it, or plant enough to feed everyone, and only keep the same amount. Obviously he's not going to work 100x as hard for the same benefits as he can working just for himself. So we have demand, and capital, but we've broken the incentive for investing. So the farmer just plants enough for himself, and in the mean-time he sells all that extra seed corn to villagers for goods, akin to a rich son spending his inheritance. By next year the farmer is surviving, but no longer wealthy and the village is starving.
Keynes-iasts always want to focus on the benefits of demand, but it's only part of the story. Friedman-ists want to focus on investment, but again it's only part of the story. Laffer gave incentives a bad name, he was the Elon Musk of economic overpromising, but he was essentially right about their importance.
Our economy functions ok right now even though our corporate tax system is among the worst in the world and makes for substantial impediments to investments. The Republican bill lowers the rate significantly and allows for one time repatriation, but still leaves significant disincentives (and doesn't address progressivity at all).
Our economy would likely function better, productivity and incomes would increase faster, if we eliminated corporate income taxes. But our entire tax system would become less progressive if we didn't also address dividend/capital gains rates when we eliminated them.
I've seen this stated in a few prior debates I've had on this topic, but I'd ask the rebuttal: Why can't you make that EXACT statement but s/corporate income/personal income/? I never understood why capital investment was more a focus than consumer demand, especially given well understood properties of both marginal spend for low vs high worth individuals (low income salary workers will spend more by % on goods and services than wealthy investors) and the assertion that we are "swimming in investor money" right now. (I see the long bull market, P/E ratios, VCs over the last decade/ICOs/wealth gap as datapoints)
I'm 100% sure someone in the finance world has already thought this through but I don't know the words to search for, and my own intuition suggests that supporting demand-side consumption is going to be a far better driver for true efficient allocations of funds and market growth to support a virtuous cycle of consumerism and employment than investor money will.