Today’s column is about the Biden administration’s proposal for corporate tax reform — a term I use advisedly. For this isn’t just about raising the tax rate, although that’s part of it. It’s also an attempt to crack down on tax avoidance, in particular the strategies multinational corporations use to shift reported profits to low-tax jurisdictions.

Will this happen? Probably, although it will be tricky keeping the Democratic caucus in line (there won’t be any Republican votes). But it wouldn’t be happening if the 2017 Trump tax cut for corporations hadn’t been such a complete flop, hadn’t failed so completely to deliver the promised surge in business investment.

So what I want to talk about here is why even many critics, myself included, thought the Trump tax cut was less bad than the usual Republican tax plan, followed by three reasons we were, it turned out, too kind.

The least bad idea?

Republican tax cuts are usually concentrated on high-income individuals, and are justified with the claim that cutting marginal tax rates will lead to an explosion in individual effort, entrepreneurship, and so on.

There have been many debunkings […]