There are broadly two places a corporation’s money goes: expenses and profits. Expenses are either paid directly to individuals as income, or to other companies

There are broadly two places a corporation’s money goes: expenses and profits. Expenses are either paid directly to individuals as income, or to other companies, where the money still ends up as either expenses or profits. There’s also the fact that everything a corporation sells is generally considered valuable enough by someone else to be a good deal at that price, so all the revenue they generate also represents value being provided to their counterparty. In economics there is a thing called deadweight loss, which is the value lost when some kind of policy (like an inefficient tax) distorts the quantity supplied:quantity demanded relationship. When you tax only income and profits, you generally avoid deadweight loss because you shift the taxation to be “after” the supply:demand has already been determined; by allowing for expenses paid to other companies to be deducted, value isn’t taxed twice because ultimately that money always ends up as someone else’s income or profits. If you’re purely interested in more taxes to capture value for the government more efficiently (and not as a vice or pigouvian tax) instituting more taxes introduces double taxation that shifts the tax before the transaction and introduced deadweight loss which lowers overall output and value generated. If you do mean to suggest the tax should be Pigouvian, that kind of already exists. Corporations have to pay a lot of the costs for compliance and remediation. I’m pretty sure to avoid all the issues of the past, companies have to put a bunch of money/assets in escrow so if they fuck up the government doesn’t get stuck with the bill. It is true though that all taxpayers pay for eg the EPA and the fees paid by corporations generally don’t cover the full environment cost; generally this means the externalities of production aren’t being accurately priced and it would be better to shift those externalities into the companies. But those kinds of pigouvian taxes have a major flaw in that we live in a global market economy, so without full international cooperation they just make your local industry uncompetitive and shift production to places with less regulations. Also, even though natural resource extraction generates some profits for private individuals, we generally all benefit from it. So it’s not too bad to tax some of the environmental compliance costs in a non-pigouvian manner.