The corporate tax has always been a Rube Goldberg machine, trying to accomplish some simple tasks through unnecessarily complex machinations. So, it’s fitting, in a perverse way, that the Biden administration would try to jury-rig a patch for this complex machine.

That patch is called a “global minimum tax,” and President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have gotten most of the world’s governments to sign up for it. A global minimum tax surely will not work, but it’s valuable nonetheless as a demonstration of the problems with a corporate income tax.