It was bound to happen. With all the talk of the need for drastic reform of the tax system, it was only a matter of time until someone came up with a proposal to ditch the corporate income tax altogether. And of course it would be in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, where Stanford professor Michael J. Boskin makes the case today, with scant regard for the employment implications for legions of corporate tax folks.

Boskin trots out the usual arguments: the economic distortions caused by the tax, the double taxation of corporate income, the loss of U.S. tax competitiveness. And he throws in some thoughts on replacing both corporate and personal income tax with a consumption tax, a scheme which, he says, Nobel Laureate economist Robert Lucas describes as delivering “great benefits at little cost, making it ‘the largest genuinely true free lunch I have seen.’”

Strangely, Boskin makes no mention of one other major issue with the corporate income tax code, namely the compliance cost that its labyrinthine complexity imposes on businesses. One example: General Electric’s domestic return for 2009 was 24,000 pages long, according to Forbes. After all the brainpower that went into that document (and perhaps because of it), how much did GE actually end up paying to Uncle Sam? Zip.

Corporations pass on their tax burdens to actual human beings, of course — as Boskin points out, “only people pay taxes” — and to that extent businesses are essentially unpaid tax collectors for the income tax, just as much as they are, in a more obvious way, for sales taxes. As a result, visibility into the true collection cost of the corporate income tax is practically zero. But it must be immense, including as it does a good slice of the salaries of throngs of corporate tax professionals.

If Boskin were to have his way (which, of course, he won’t), many of them would be heading for the unemployment line. Not that they’d be worried. Anyone with the smarts to find their way through FAS 109 is not going to be out of a job for long. ###