Kerry remembers himself from 1984 - where he ran on a tax overhaul. It is where he "goes to ground" so to speak, and looks for a way to drive a wedge in. His corporate tax proposal looks, on the surface, like a cut - and then you realize what he wants to do is tax foreign profits equally with domestic profits - giving companies less of an incentive to invest in making profits overseas first. It is also designed to bring in a hit of revenue its first year with a tax holiday.
In Europe - which has different standards on what companies can give as perks - the trend has been to reduce corporate taxes and increase personal taxes. Trading ,as Modigliani - the economist, not the artist, pointed out - "flat for progressive taxation". The cost, of course, is that corporate transparency is at a premium - so that corporations can't be used to "hide" personal income. Europe's solution is a "VAT" tax - a national sales tax that ensures that if it is consumable - tax is paid on it one way or another.
Is the US headed in this direction? Only long legislative fights will say, but clearly the current US system has insufficient safe guards against what Madison called the end of a Republic - "the majority voting itself a subsidy from the common treasury".