SORKIN: David, I have a tax question for you. What do you think the ultimate effective tax rate should be on corporations? COTE: Zero. SORKIN: Zero? COTE: The problem is from a fairness perspective, nobody would be able to stand it. But at the the end of the day, jobs come from companies and if we wanted to create the most effective foreign direct investment pipeline you’ve ever seen, we would have the lowest rate possible.

CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin gets an illuminating answer to the question "what should the corporate tax rate be" from Honeywell CEO and Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission member David Cote:You have to have an absolute disregard for the truth to claim that a lower corporate tax rate is better for the economy, and all it takes is the briefest look at the low effective corporate tax rate in the United States at this time, comparing it with equivalent rates in other industrialized nations or with American tax rates in the past, to realize that.

But it's also rich to hear Cote talking about how an effective corporate tax rate of zero is ideal because "jobs come from companies," given his own company's jobs record. Honeywell locked out 220 of its workers, members of the Steelworkers, for more than 13 months to force them to accept concessions including cuts to health benefits for current workers and for retirees, to move away from a defined benefit pension, to lose seniority protections, and to allow Honeywell to contract out their jobs.

So Cote, who is, according to Forbes, the fifth highest-paid CEO in America at nearly $56 million, thinks that Honeywell and other large corporations should pay nothing in taxes because they create jobs, while under his leadership Honeywell has fought like hell to make the jobs it provides pay less, offer less stability, and lead to a less secure retirement. This is why you can't separate out corporate taxes from jobs from services—they're all interwoven, and the agendas of CEOs like Cote and politicians like Scott Walker and Paul Ryan take that fully into account, seeking simultaneously to decrease the power of government by depriving it of revenue, to decrease the power of workers by locking them out or passing anti-union legislation, and always, always, seeking to increase the power of corporations, whether through paying lower taxes or cutting workers' health care.