Free Ride! Meet the Companies That Don't Even Pretend to Pay Taxes

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/154653/free_ride%21_meet_the_companies_that_don%27t_even_pretend_to_pay_taxes/

Like me, you’re probably knee-deep in receipts and forms right now, getting ready to pay your share in taxes so that our country can function. Meanwhile, many giant corporations are getting a free ride. Fairness is one of our most treasured American values, but “scam and dodge” has become the mantra of our corporations and the pols who protect them.


Big business apologists like to tell us that the U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent is too high, and makes companies less “competitive” with foreign firms. Yet we all know that corporations hire legions of wily accountants to find loopholes that often bring their tax rate down to next to nothing.

In 2008, Goldman Sachs paid a laughable 1.1 percent of its income in taxes. That same year, it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an $800 billion bailout, courtesy of you and me. Let’s savor that irony for a moment, as we recall that the bailout is not all we paid for Goldman Sachs to operate its rapacious business, which, as the cynical editors of Bloomberg recently reminded us, apparently has no obligation to serve humanity. We pay for its employees to be educated. We pay for the infrastructure required to facilitate its business. We pay a gargantuan sum in “defense spending” which essentially funnels our tax dollars into protections and path-smoothing that allows Goldman Sachs to operate in, and to penetrate, foreign markets.

Paying 1.1 percent for all this largesse is surely a joke. And an even bigger travesty is that many outsized firms pay nothing at all, as General Electric famously managed to do in 2010, despite showing $10.5 billion in profits. GE is not alone. According to a report from Citizens for Tax Justice, 37 of the biggest American corporations did not pay one red cent in taxes in 2010. Financial services, you’ll be thrilled to know, received the largest share of all federal tax subsidies over the last three years, despite the fact that the size and recklessness of that industry is one of the greatest dangers to our economic well-being.

But increasingly, the biggest punchline of all is a growing breed of firms that are classified as “non-taxable.” That’s right. These firms pay zilch. Nada. Zippo.