A judicious writer avoids adjectives like “mindblowing,” especially when covering political or economic issues.
But
no other word seems to describe the stunning reality of corporate
taxation in modern America, which cries out for the italics-heavy,
exclamation-point-driven format made famous by
Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Stylistic overkill? Read these thirteen facts and you may change your mind.
1.
We’re told we can’t “afford” full Social Security benefits, even
though closing corporate tax-haven loopholes would pay for Obama’s
“chained CPI” benefit cut more than ten times over!
Abusive offshore tax havens cost the US $150 billion in lost tax revenue every year (via
FACT Coalition). That’s $1.5 trillion over the next ten years.
The
“chained CPI” cut, proposed by President Obama and supported by
Republicans, is projected to “save” a total of $122 billion to $130
billion over the same time period by denying benefits to seniors and
disabled people.
It’s
true. “Serious” politicians and pundits are demanding that ordinary
people sacrifice earned benefits, while at the same time allowing
corporations to avoid more than ten times as much in taxes.
2. Corporate tax rates are near their 60-year low, even though profits are at a 60-year high!
3. Wells Fargo got $8 billion in tax breaks, even as executives at its subsidiary Wachovia avoided indictment for
laundering money for the Mexican drug cartels!
That’s right. Wells Fargo paid a
negative
tax rate of -1.4 percent between 2008 and 2010 while Wachovia, a Wells
Fargo subsidiary, admitted to laundering more than $378 billion for
Mexican drug gangs.
We’re talking about
crazed killers
like “El Loco” and gangs like “Los Zetas” – gangs who cut people’
heads off and toss them out onto disco dance floors or display them in
the town square.
Wachovia
bankers ignored repeated warnings from law enforcement officials, and
continued to launder money for cartels that have murdered tens of
thousands.
And yet no criminal indictments were handed down because, as a Senate investigator told
Bloomberg News, “”There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure.”
4. Some other huge corporations paid less than nothing, too.
Pepco Holdings (-57.6% tax rate)
General Electric (-45.3%)
DuPont (-3.4%)
Verizon (-2.9%)
Boeing (-1.8%)
Honeywell (-0.7%)
5. The amount of money US corporations are
holding offshore is an estimated
one trillion dollars!
Rather
than tax these profits the way other countries do, corporate
politicians are promoting a tax “repatriation” break that would let
corporations “bring this money home” while paying even less than their
currently low rates.
They tried that in 2004 and it didn’t create any jobs. In fact, corporations took the tax break and then
fired thousands of people. What “repatriation”
did do is line a lot of wealthy investors’ pockets. So, naturally, they want to do it again.
6. One building in the Cayman Islands is the official location of 18,857 corporations!
According to the
Government Accountability Office,
a five-story building called “Ugland House” is home to nearly twenty
thousand corporations. That’s impressive, especially for such a small
edifice. (Perhaps it has supernatural half-floors and space-time defying
“mind tunnels” like
the office in
Being John Malkovich.)
While
impressive, Ugland House’s distinction pales next to that of 1209
North Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware. According to
one investigation, that address is home to
217,000 corporations.
That’s because Delaware has very generous tax rules – and, as a result, is home to
more than half of all the corporate subsidiaries in the United States.That’s
startling, since only 1/342th of the nation’s population lives in that
state (917,092 residents, out of a national total of 313,914,040,
according to the latest(
census results).
7. Conservatives complain about the “official” corporate tax rate in this country, but corporations actually pay roughly one-third of the official rate in actual taxes.
The official, or “statutory,” corporate tax rate is 35 percent. But the
actual rate paid by American corporations is only 12 percent, less than that paid by many middle-class Americans. (Source: The
FACT Coalition.)
In fact, US Corporations pay less tax as a percentage of the GDP than corporations in Canada. Or Japan …
…
or South Korea. Or Norway. Or Luxembourg, New Zealand, Israel, the
Czech Republic, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, the United Kingdom,
Denmark, Finland, and Italy. (Source: OECD
StatsExtract interactive database.)
8. Corporations used to pay 30 percent of Federal taxes, and now they pay less than 7 percent!
That’s
because the corporate tax rate has plunged since Dwight D. Eisenhower
was President and is now the lowest it’s been in modern history.
9. Big corporations paid $216 million to Congress and got $223 billion in tax breaks!
As Citizens for Tax Justice and USPIRG
reported,
280 large and profitable corporations contributed $216 million to
Congressional campaigns over four election cycles and got nearly a
quarter of a trillion dollars in tax breaks.
That’s a terrific investment for them – a return of more than a thousand to one – but it’s a bad deal for the American people.
10. We don’t even know who owns some corporations, even though that makes it easier to evade taxes, dodge creditors, avoid paying alimony or child support, and even fund terrorism!
Here are some examples of investments that might represent a
terror threat. Corporate interests are blocking disclosure rules that would help protect our national security.
11. Bank of America committed foreclosure fraud, was bailed out by the government, and then paid no taxes on $4.4 billion in profit!
That’s right. In 2010, while BofA was negotiating a sweet settlement deal for its foreclosure fraud, it paid
nothing in taxes. (Source:
FACT Coalition.) Zero, on $17.2 billion in offshore earnings. (Source:
Americans for Tax Fairness.)
Its
$4.1 billion tax break came on the heels of the bank’s taxpayer-funded
bailout, immunity from prosecution for its criminal employees, and a
cushy government settlement for its foreclosure fraud.
Now
David Dayen reports that the bank has apparently continued to defraud
customers in violation of its government settlement. Whistleblowers
have stated in
affidavits that they were “told to lie” to customers, continued to deceive homeowners before foreclosing on them, and
flipped customers to new servicing companies to invalidate previous homeowner agreements.
12. What they call “tax reform” would actually prevent our elected representatives from giving businesses financial incentives to improve our lives!
The
word “reform” is an honorable one that’s been put to some dishonorable
uses lately. “Entitlement reform,” for example, is merely a euphemism
for gutting Social Security and Medicare.
Similarly,
corporate-backed politicians are pushing a formula for permanent
corporate tax breaks and calling it “tax reform.” They insist their
“reform” be “revenue neutral” and say it will “broaden the base while
lowering the rate.”
Here’s
an English translation: The current, unsustainably low rates for
corporations would be made permanent, while eliminating many tax
deductions in the name of “simplification.”
Here’s what that really
means: The domestic tax credit for creating jobs? Gone. Tax breaks for
protecting the environment with clean energy, rather than harming
other people’s health and leaving a mess for the rest of us to clean
up? Gone.
All
in all we’d lose dozens of important policies that make our lives
better, while permanently fixing corporate taxes at today’s cushy
giveaway rates.
“Reform”? Ripoff is more like it.
13.
Despite their greed, mismanagement, and freeloading, tax-dodging
corporations are using shell organizations like “Fix the Debt” and “the
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget” to tell ordinary Americans they have to sacrifice even more to preserve corporate wealth!
These
organizations are using the heads of failed banks – people like
Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs – to dispense
“advice on the economy.” That’s like getting navigation tips from the
captain of the Exxon Valdez.
(Tax breaks for Exxon Mobil: $4.1 billion between 2008 and 2010. The company paid no taxes at all in 2009.)
These
executives and their paid spokespeople tell the rest of us we need to
“sacrifice” and “tighten our belts” so that their party can go on
forever. And too often they’re treated as credible sources, rather than
as corrupting influences on our public life.
It’s
all true – and there are many more astonishing facts to be found in
the world of corporate taxation. To fix the economy more people will
need to learn about them – and demand that they be changed.
Read more: 13 Mindblowing Facts About America’s Tax-Dodging Corporations
