Global minimum corporate tax: 130 nations to support U.S. proposal

Yes, I agree. I myself have always wondered about the opposite strategy: literally zero corporation tax, compensated by an overarching income-agnostic personal income tax which would go up to stupidly high percents in the stupidly high income brackets, say for the sake of the argument 80% above 1 million €/$/£, 90% above 10 million, 95% above 100 million etc. I don't necessarily mean these specific values, but you get the idea.

This income tax wouldn't care if the individual's income is salaried, or dividends, or stocks, or real estate, or whathaveyou. Any transfer of wealth from an un-taxed business to a taxable individual would count equally. Of course, the zero corporation tax would be conditional on all of a corporation's profits being distributed to individuals in states subject to the zero-corporate-hardcore-income tax agreement. I'm sure it would be extremely difficult to implement correctly, and to avoid tax avoidance schemes it would also require strong levels of capital controls with non-participant nations.

I may be a bit naïve, but intuitively I feel that erasing corporation tax altogether but highly taxing all individuals' personal profits may encourage innovation and reinvestment, and perhaps even make UBI a feasible option.

>The idea that politicians and bureaucracies can defer to external international conventions to be the bad-cop for wildly unpopular policy decisions

It's as though so many people saw Brexit and completely refused to learn anything from it. In the UK prior to Brexit the EU was often the scapegoat for things that politicians wanted but knew they couldn't get popular support for, the classic example is how the unpopular (and ultimately abortive) attempt to switch the UK fully to the metric system was very much seen as "petty-minded EU bureaucrats getting one over on the British public" in the tabloids when the reality was that almost all of the effort was Westminster's doing, mostly because business interests had been calling for it as a way to ease international trade.

The problem is that while falsely blaming an external outgroup for your problems isn't immediately dangerous, it can quickly spiral out of control. Around 2013 blaming the EU for bad policy-making on a wide range of things like immigration, the refugee crisis, a percieved decline in law and order, a creeping sense of political control over public discussion, and a whole list of other things reached its peak and the referendum was basically wrenched out of Cameron's hand. Eventually if you subvert a democracy by blaming your own unpopular choices on an outgroup, the inevitable question people start asking is "why don't we just get rid of $outgroup then? As you say, $outgroup cause all our problems so let's get rid of them and solve all our problems at once" which many billions of pounds and geopolitical bridges burned later is exactly what happened.

If nations as you put it "defer to external international conventions to be the bad-cop for wildly unpopular policy decisions" then things like Brexit are the inevitable result. Not only is it inherently wrong to sidestep democracy like that in my opinion, if supranational organisations are blamed for things that are unpopular then their influence will eventually be damaged by this. Organisations like the EU, the UN, and others aren't just limitless negativity sinks for domestic politics - all that political negativity has to go somewhere and eventually it just spills out.

How many days until I'm a tax-paying citizen of Amazon.com Inc.?

I think you're misunderstanding the concept here, this has nothing to do with dodging responsibility for unpopular policies. If you think countries shouldn't tax corporate profits at all, great, but that's a separate discussion; this is predicated on the assumption that all countries desire a non-zero corporate tax, and just need a way to get there.

The point of this measure is to avoid a coordination trap that leads to corp tax rates converging on zero even though each country does not want that. Such scenarios are well studied, and a mutually agreed upon enforcement mechanism is the optimal solution. If that resembles a conspiracy theory to someone, well, hopefully they can read the wikipedia page on the Prisoners' Dilemma and learn something new.

this is a benefit only international corporations get to enjoy, which gives them an unfair advantage in the market.

if your goal is to have a few conglomerates rule the world, then this is a good way to do it. Not sure how that is much different from a powerful "state" though