Your concerns make sense for considering things like payroll taxes and taxing other operating expenses. But if we consider taxing corporate profits that go to shareholders, taxing here is a very relatively painless place to tax, as opposed to, say sales tax. This is doubly so when corporations are already sitting in hoards of cash and not investing, due to lack of opportunity or demand, interest rates are low, productivity gains are going towards the top, etc.

I'm not quite as cynical when it comes to bureaucrats (military contractors aside), because as we can see in some of the recent teachers strikes, it makes sense to tax oil/gas corporations who are making full use of states infrastructure to for the benefit of themselves (and workers etc). The tax rate is not really affecting how much they invest. [1]

I'm with you on corporate influence though. However, I think the answer there is to limit corporate influence of elections, say by disallowing funding of candidate specific ads and limiting the $ they can put towards issue lobbying.

[1]https://qz.com/1243098/oklahoma-teachers-strike-how-income-t...