Pay your taxes? These 10 Corporate Tax Dodgers didn't . . .

[ProfessionalLeftist]

[slackmaster]

1. I blame Congress

They make the laws that allow corporations to structure their finances in ways that avoid taxation.

[ProfessionalLeftist]

4. Unfortunately most of them are owned by corprats

just like the rest of the government. Which is why this is allowed.

[slackmaster]

5. Yes, and people keep voting for them

So really the people have only themselves to blame.

[fredamae]

7. It is a Conflict of Interest b/c

Their votes directly impact their Personal Finances...They have investments in many of these corps and personally profit from the laws, rules and policies they bind to law. In addition to that, they make laws determining things like Farm Subsidies, Oil and etc...another conflict. Michele Bachmann/family gets a lot of "Welfare Money" from us via farm subsidies. I think I heard there are about 5 or so lawmakers reaping these benefits.

[90-percent]

2. You all are just jealous

If you want to skip on your tax responsibilities, simply go out and hire 975 accountants to do your tax return.

If you're real lucky, you could end up with a 4.1 billion dollar rebate just like General Electric.

-90% Jimmy

:sarcasm:

[ProfessionalLeftist]

3. Just incorporate...

...that allows a multitude of sins.

[Smarmie Doofus]

6. Anyone know how JP Morgan Chase stacks up here?

Or where to access the pertinent data?

Going to a Tax Day demo there later today and I want some hard facts at the ready in case we actually draw some media.

[melm00se]

14. you can review the financial reports for a company on line

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=JPM&annual

Income Tax Expense $7,489,000,000

this comes from their Income Statement and works out to be an effective tax rate of 30.1% (page 63 of their annual report: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ONE/1228308221x0x458380/ab2612d5-3629-46c6-ad94-5fd3ac68d23b/2010_JPMC_AnnualReport_.pdf)

[Egalitariat]

8. That chart is either highly ignorant, or is aimed at confusing already ignorant people

For example, items 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 try to use "Tax Refunds" to justify it's premise the companies are tax dodgers. A Tax Refund is what you get when you pay in more than you owe during the year, and then your official tax return shows it was too much. You can pay a shit-pile worth of taxes and still get a Tax Refund.

When the truth is so far on our side, I don't know why he'd go out of his way to use ignorance to justify his position.

I also have a hard time believing that Bank of America got $1 TRILLION in bailout money.

And he blames several oil companies for "getting tax breaks". That's not their fault. That's Congress's fault.

[socialist_n_TN]

9. So does this mean we don't draw attention to the LAWS

that allow things like this to happen?

[Egalitariat]

10. Absolutely not, but it should be above board. There are people who will take that information

and try to use it to support a position, and they'll look foolish to anyone who actually understand what's going on.

[Igel]

13. But what happened?

I mean, what actually were the events that took place that led to this state of affairs? The facts, not the fact-free, decontextualized, nearly existential moral indignation that many feel.

They overpaid their taxes. It doesn't say what amount of taxes they paid. It doesn't even give a percent. It just says that they got a refund. This almost certainly means they overpaid their taxes.

Should we have laws to say that any overpayment is automatically the taxes owed for that year?

I know that we overpaid our taxes last year. And we get a refund. Apparently the law allowing this is an abomination, even if we overpaid in anticipation of having greater self-employment revenue that failed to materialize. I suspect most overpayment occurs for this kind of reason: Either you fail to achieve your expected income or something happens to increase the number and amount of deductions.

This brings us to the rest of the claims. A lot of losses are tax deductible. You take a hit to your infrastructure, the assumption is that you'll need the tax savings to rebuild or replace. It's hard to draw the tax code to rule in benefits for a favored class of people while ruling them out for a class that you loathe. Granted this kind of bias is fairly common in the tax and legal codes, but they still tend to be problematic in their formulation.

Moreover, a lot of investment is tax deductible. That's generally considered a good thing, because investment does things like reduce pollution, reduce energy consumption, and can even increase productivity or help with job creation. The tax code rewards such things. Granted, often the money spent would have been spent anyway--many people who got new cars under the car rebate program, who upgraded windows or bought houses would have done so anyway; but only "often," not exclusively or even "most of the time." Take, for example, Obama's push for investment in green technology. He's not god: He can't rule by decree, and order people to invest their own money (there's a little document called the Constitution in the way for that, plus the entire antiquated concept of natural law). He pushes by using the bully pulpit, but that's not very effective; he really pushes by using the tax code.

In other words, the tax code isn't there just to collect revenue. It's not there to (just) impose some view of fiscal fairness or morality. It's also there to guide private expenditures, to use tax savings to leverage spending on things that Congress, at some point, considered a societally advantageous, desirable goals.

[midnight]

11. K&R

[OhioChick]

12. K&R n/t

[ItNerd4life]

15. What a stupid, misleading article. It's says what 'refunds' were, not taxes paid.

Why doesn't it say what the companies paid, most of the stuff talks about what 'refunds' the companies got.
Refunds are not bad, most people like to get 'refunds' because they paid so much over the year.