Corporations Are Screwing American Taxpayers

The middle class in America doesn't have much choice -- they either pay their income taxes or they go to jail. The same is not true for corporations. Through a combination of subsidies, tax loopholes, and the ability to hide much of their profits off-shore, there are corporations that pay no income taxes at all. To say this is an economic injustice is an understatement.

This is not only unfair to middle-class taxpayers, but it has put the government into a real bind since it no longer brings in enough money to meet its obligations. President Clinton left office with the country registering a budget surplus, but the Republicans have destroyed that. By starting two unnecessary wars and giving the rich and corporations huge tax breaks, the Republicans created a huge deficit which has grown to trillions of dollars.

But the deficit would have grown even without the two wars. That's because the combination of corporations (and the rich) paying the lowest tax rate since World War II and the corporations who have avoided paying any taxes at all, have resulted in the lowest government tax revenues since the 1950s. The government is simply not taking in enough money to pay its bills.


The Republican answer for this is to give even more tax breaks to the rich and the corporations, and pay for it by cutting social programs, unemployment payments, education, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, and environmental protections (among other things). They don't seem to care that ordinary Americans are hurting, and 20 million of them can't find work.

The simplest answer to these problems would be to do away with the massive Bush tax cuts for the rich -- and put the tax rates back where they were in the Clinton administration. But that would just be a partial solution. Action needs to be taken to make sure that corporations pay taxes just like ordinary Americans do. The subsidies and tax loopholes must be eliminated, and the money hidden off-shore rooted out and taxed (with penalties).

You may already know about companies like Bank of America and ExxonMobil who didn't pay any taxes last year in spite of making billions in profits. But there's another group of companies, about thirty of them, who haven't paid any income taxes in the last THREE years -- in spite of the fact that they made from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars of profits in those three years. Here are those companies:

This is indefensible. While Americans paid taxes on much less (the median income for Americans is around $50,000), these 30 companies made a total of more than $160 billion and didn't pay one cent in income taxes. In fact, they actually got money from the government -- nearly $11 billion dollars (which is a NEGATIVE income tax rate of nearly 7%).

Understand, we are not talking about gross income here, but net profits (after all expenses have been deducted). The smallest of these companies made $286 million in those three years, and the largest made over $49 billion. How can it be fair that they paid NO income tax? To put it bluntly, these corporations are screwing the American taxpayers -- and it must stop!