uh, just because they reported the income doesn’t mean they paid the taxes owed on it…

Financial statements and annual reports are available to the public for publicly traded corporations. Take a look at those documents for the large corporations we all know and you’ll see billions payed in taxes. Now some have made the point that these businesses will pass those tax costs along to their customers and this may have some merit. But to claim they simply don’t pay is just plain wrong.

Exxon-Mobil paid $30 billion in taxes in 2007, about as much as the entire bottom 50% of individual wage-earners combined. Oliver is twice-correct, the GAO study included companies with no income, so of course they paid no taxes. Secondly, this study was politically motivated. The US has the second-highest corporate income tax rate among OECD countries

Am I supposed to feel bad for ExxonMobile? If they paid $30B in taxes, but made $100B, they’re still paying a percentage of their income…just like your ‘wage-earners.’

If they make two thousand times more money than the average person, they obviously should be paying two thousand times more in taxes…and that would account for a lot of ‘wage-earners.’ I don’t make a billion dollars a year, do you, tim?

Oh sorry, that should be 20,000 times as much as the average ‘wage-earner’ - not two thousand. MY BAD. Wouldn’t want to short-change the paupers at E-M.

silly me. I get confused working with so many zeroes, ya know? Exxon made 2 MILLION times more than the average American ‘wage-earner’ last year. OOPS.

The moral of this story is no one needs to feel bad that they paid $30 billion in taxes, because it was THEIR FAIR SHARE. At least they paid.

One can only speculate as to why certain companies paid no taxes at some point between 1999 and 2005. According to the Reuters article on the subject, “The report did not name any companies. The GAO said corporations escaped paying federal income taxes for a variety of reasons including operating losses, tax credits and an ability to use transactions within the company to shift income to low tax countries.” (http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN1249465620080812)

I used to work for a small company that made use of basic tax law to minimize their tax burden. At the end of each calendar year they would increase their cash outflow with purchases and by dumping a large sum of their profits into the company’s ESOP program and bonus plans. Their goal was to get as close to zero as possible.

Not judging whether it’s ethical or not here, mainly pointing out that a company making profit can legally show no profit within the confines of tax law, simply by deverting those dollars to expenses, dividend payments, and other legal options.

How you feel about them is irrelevant. The point Mr Martin is making is that the claim large corporations do not pay taxes in this country is a myth. More people would know this if it weren’t for newspapers like the Post that promulgate false economic information on a near daily basis.

Who pays “corporate” taxes. If you work for a corporation, you do. If you buy the products or services of a corporation, you do. If you or your retirement plan own stock in a corporation, you do. So let’s stick it to the evil corporations.

Let’s have 4 more years of McBush.
http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2008/08/12/two-thirds-of-corporations-dont-pay-income-taxes/