Are you sure about point four? Taxes on corporate profits might be indirectly passed on to consumers (e.g. corporations take advantage of the knowledge of the taxes to justify raising prices), but since goods and services are presumably already optimally priced, and taxes on profits aren't an increase to costs, they shouldn't be directly passed on.
It would be an extraordinary claim to say that corporations are not pricing as high as they can without decreasing profits. If you believe that there is some other mechanism by which taxes on corporate profits could increase prices, please explain it.
Thank you for actually providing a source. I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but their methodology seems reasonable, although it's not certain that corporations would behave the same in response to a federal tax. As is, that paper supports the assertion that some percentage of taxes is passed on to consumers, though not a total pass through, which is very different from a blanket "taxes get passed on to consumers".
"A one percentage point increase in a state-level corporate tax rate leads to an increase in affected retail prices of approximately 0.24 percent." is much less strong of an affect than, say, tariffs.
They also say "Pass-through is larger for products purchased by high-income households, higher priced goods, and in less competitive markets.", which makes it seem like corporate taxes might still be highly progressive even with pass-through.
> Prices are set by supply and demand. Taxing corporate profits offsets the supply curve, resulting in higher prices. The data supports this.
Reducing corporate taxes also appears to reduce what is paid to labour:
> From 2010 to 2013, the Chinese central government cut the corporate income tax rate in 21 cities for service firms whose revenue from outsourcing services offshore surpassed half of their total revenue. Leveraging a regression discontinuity design with proprietary administrative data, we find that a one percentage point decrease in the statutory corporate income tax rate induces a one percentage point decrease in the firm-level labor share. Firms respond to the tax cut by increasing their physical capital and bank borrowing while keeping their employment unchanged, consistent with a capital deepening process documented in recent theoretical models. Our results suggest that falling corporate income taxes could have contributed to the global decline in the labor share. […] Labor share is defined as the share of gross value-added paid to labor and can be measured at the level of the firm or the economy.
Shareholders often take the biggest hit from corporate taxes. Consumers can to, but in most cases I think it's primarily the shareholders. But it will vary depending on the business and the market.
It would be an extraordinary claim to say that corporations are not pricing as high as they can without decreasing profits. If you believe that there is some other mechanism by which taxes on corporate profits could increase prices, please explain it.