American Tax Base

Naming Names Of Corporations Who Pay No Taxes

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G.E., yes that G.E. who is in the White House, not only hasn't paid taxes for the last three years, our government actually paid them. From 2008-2010, G.E. received tax rebates of $4.737 billion, while earning a pretax profit of $10.46 billion. This is while they offshore outsource jobs to China and get bail outs for their financial branch, G.E. Capital.

Citizens for Tax Justice have published a new study, Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers, 2008-2010, which is simply a must read for every American. Some of the most notorious multinational corporations, complete with bail outs and offshore outsourcing your job, paid negative taxes for the last three years. In other words, we paid them.

The study covers 280 corporations. Some of what they found:

  • Seventy-eight of the 280 companies paid zero or less in federal income taxes in at least one year from 2008 to 2010.
  • Thirty corporations paid less than nothing in aggregate federal income taxes over the entire 2008-10 period.
  • 2009 was a particularly banner year for non-payment of taxes. In that year, 49 companies paid zero or less in federal income taxes.
  • In 2008, 22 companies paid no federal income tax, and got $3.3 billion in tax rebates. In 2010, 37 companies paid no income tax, and got $7.8 billion in rebates.

Below is a table from the report, showing the top worst offenders, their pretax profits, their tax or rebate and their effective tax rate.

Full Spectrum Inequality

The Plunder, Pillage and Destruction of the American Tax Base

We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes. – Leona Helmsley

PREAMBLE:
This brief blog is an attempt at a synthesis of the excellent and exemplary research of superior individuals who have sought out the ways and manner of tax evasion and tax avoidance.

When such avoidance and evasion becomes institutionalized, the impact on any society can be quite severe. Seldom do people understand the connection between massive and institutionalized tax loss and deficit (debt) spending and the existence of debt-financed billionaires (that is, debt-financed wealth).

These activities are extremely antithetical to all forms of progress, as I endeavor to illustrate here.

In the virtual economy, tax shelter design and securitized financial instrument creation rules the day. From the information presented below, one would not be remiss to believe that those with American citizenship who work to evade taxation are truly only citizens of transnationals and multinationals, not citizens of any country.


1913

The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community is not small. It is nil. – John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash

The year 1913 was fraught with momentous change. That was the year America saw the establishment of the oil depletion allowance, the Federal Reserve System, the federal income tax and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The federal income tax as we know it today was, not unexpectedly, introduced in Congress by a Republican, to be adopted as the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution.