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You pay taxes, but why doesn’t General Electric?
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YOU pay your fair share of taxes. Small businesses do too. It’s the price we pay to educate our kids, protect our communities and have some security in retirement. Why shouldn’t some of America’s largest corporations pay their fair share too?
Corporations are making record profits. But 111 profitable Fortune 500 companies paid zero federal income taxes in one or more of the past five years, according to a recent report by Citizens for Tax Justice. What’s worse — 26 of them, including Boeing, General Electric and Verizon, paid nothing over the entire five-years. Astoundingly, they got tax refunds instead.
General Electric, which in the past has been the focus of media attention because of its record of paying an extremely low income tax rate, provides a vivid example.
GE earned a whopping US$27.5 billion in profits between 2008 and 2012, but claimed US$3 billion in tax refunds — a federal income tax rate of negative 11 percent. Put another way, GE paid less in federal income taxes than you paid over five years.
Corporate lobbyists
There is talk in Washington about overhauling the tax code. Corporate lobbyists are decrying the top corporate tax rate of 35 percent. They want you to focus on what corporations are supposed to pay instead of what they really pay. That’s because many corporations pay a lot less — averaging little more than half the top rate — 19.4 percent for all 288 companies in the Citizens for Tax Justice report.
CEOs inevitably claim that their companies pay every penny they owe and they are doing nothing illegal.
That’s the problem — it’s possible (but not guaranteed) that what they’re doing is perfectly legal. That’s because over the years corporate lobbyists have drilled so many holes into our tax code that it is like Swiss cheese.
Some of the loopholes defy logic — like the tax break for companies that give their CEOs lavish “performance based” bonuses. Others are outrageous — like a tax break for companies that shuttle their executives in corporate jets. And some are an insult to working Americans — like a special low tax rate for Wall Street hedge fund managers.
But one of the most outrageous tax loopholes of all is the one that has helped GE be such a good tax dodger. It enables Wall Street banks and other corporations with large financial units — like GE — to make it appear that profits earned in the United States were generated in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands.
Clemente is executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. Copyright: American Forum. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.
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