GAO: Most U.S. Corps. Don't Pay Income Tax

Source: AP

GAO: Trillions In Sales Untaxed For Years

POSTED: 5:19 am EDT August 12, 2008
UPDATED: 7:34 am EDT August 12, 2008

WASHINGTON -- The Government Accountability Office is set to release a report that says most U.S. corporations pay no federal income taxes.

And most foreign companies that do business in the United States aren't paying corporate taxes.

The study says about two-thirds of American corporations paid zero income taxes to Uncle Sam between 1998 and 2005.

An even higher percentage of foreign corporations avoided federal corporate taxes. At the same time, said the GAO, the firms had trillions of dollars in sales.

The study was requested by Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota.

"It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," Dorgan said.

The report doesn't name names, and the congressional agency didn't investigate why corporations aren't paying corporate or income taxes. But the GAO said it could be because of operating losses and tax credits.

Read more: http://www.newsnet5.com/money/17165868/detail.html

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Nice....

Bought and paid for right on K Street.

they donate to their favorite charities! (sarcasm)

If they don't pay any taxes, how can they have any say in the laws of our country? I hope that their corporate officers pay taxes.

How do they have a say? The old fashioned way, Bribery!

Corporate officers pay taxes? Sure, after a whole raft of deductions, dodges, and the occasional offshore account.

But their low-level employees pay taxes! In full!

And we just CAN'T tax corporations on their profits! They'd just pass the cost on to the consumer, and the price of everything would go up! So in the end the poor tax-paying employee ends up paying both taxes! Even when he stops being our employee because we shipped the job to China!

/sarcasm

So just you STFU and bend over.

God Bless America!

I wonder what would happen if we instituted a .001% across-the-board tax on profits for every job shipped overseas.

The bastards really ought to face a punitive fee for every gainfully employed taxpayer they remove from the rolls.

Although I'm seriously disgusted that it's true.

We have been bent over for so long we now think we are standing up!!

Why should we pay taxes? Are we discriminated against?

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/index.php

recommended

Just another sellout.

Pattern voting, apathy and laziness -- corporations love us.

rate in members of congress. I imagine part of that is due to some states having term limits. But even with that, an outgoing senator can run for the house, and vice versa, in some states with limits. Yes, we are chumps.

Ohio had tried to implement it in the 1990s, but it was struck down in the courts in part because Ohio would have been the only state to have term limits on federal legislators and it would have been a disadvantage to the state, if I remember correctly.

Ohio does have term limits on state legislators. I'm sure other states do, too.

in some of the states.

That explains why there is such a small turn-over rate in the US legislature. I don't understand why we complain about our dissatisfaction with congress, and then send back 90% of them time after time.

Thanks for the correction.

edited to add a thank you

i can presonally run a loss for the year, and still pay income taxes on the money coming in AND sales tax, property tax, etc. on the money going out.

corporations, meanwhile, can expense practically everything the care to spend money on.

McCain has become such a corporate shill and liar, showing his true character as a sellout with no integrity, instead of the "maverick" image he cultivates. Are the American people buying his crap? Hopefully this report will crash the repuke myth of high corporate taxes.

:mad:

the world.

I heard this headline this morning, and I think it's somewhat misleading. I should preface my comments by saying I agree that overall, corporate profits are undertaxed.

It's just that using the "set" of "corporations" is wrong and misleading. Most corporations -- probably 95% -- are just shell companies set up for various legal reasons. For example, many corporations are wholly owned subsidiaries of other corporations, and their profits are attributable to parent corporations. Many corporations are set up for one-off transactions. Many are created and never used. When I worked in the financial sector, my impression was that about 95% of the corporations we created had no actual business function. You set them up with a phone call to a Delaware company that does nothing but create corporations, send in cookie cutter, standard issue articles of incorporation and bylaws, and pay about $100, and you have a corporation.

The proper "set" should be what is called in the business world "operating companies" -- corporations that actually engage in transactions with outside entities, which is to say that actually do stuff and report profits.

Also, corporations only have to pay taxes if they have income, which is to say profits. Many businesses that are created fail, and have no tax liability.

I'm not sure what "set" the GAO report was using. Perhaps they meant a majority of corporations that file income tax returns and reported income, or a majority of operating corporations. If so, then the results are disturbing. But if the set us just corporations, no one should be surprised.

that being that the "double taxation" lie was used to divert attention from auditing corporations and towards auditing individuals. The theory was that the individual would be the only one paying taxes when in practice instead of having one entity to possibly audit you have 10 or 100 thousand (the individuals) potential audits. This not only greatly diminishes the chance of the Senior VP of blahblahblah from getting audited (people taking a earned income tax credit are something like 12 times more likely to get audited than someone making over $100K) but the corporations have almost NO chance of getting audited...so they create covers as you describe.

bottom line is that Joe six-pack gets screwed.

I was not surprised by this. A little misleading.

them to set up in their town. Tax breaks on everything . Corporations also once set up threaten to leave town thus weakening the tax base and employment numbers for the place.

Corporate income taxes as a percent of federal revenue peaked in the early 1950's, a time when the wealth produced by this nation was more equally distributed. It reached a high of 31% of revenues in 1952. Corporate share averaged 28% in the 1950's, declined to 21% in the sixties, and has averaged 10% since the eighties (source).

"According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, total federal and state corporate income tax revenues in the United States in 2000, measured as a share of the economy, were about one-quarter less than the average for other OECD member countries. Thirty-five years ago, the opposite was true — corporations in the United States bore a heavier burden than their European counterparts" (see source, above). The Reagan Reactionary Revolution (the RRR) has been a blazing success for monied elites. This counter-reveloution has continued successfully during the reigns of GHWB, Clinton (the best "Republican" President we ever had), and GWB.

Over this same period of time (the RRR), after-tax incomes for the top 1% of our nation have grown by 176% (source2) while for the middle 20% -- as "middle" of "middle-class" as you can get -- income has grown by only 21%. Share of income for the top 1% has now exceeded the extremes of the Roaring Twenties, and we all know where that lead.

The RRR represents class war, and it has been raging since Inauguration Day in 1981. The rich have been very successful. The top 10% of our nation now own 71% of our wealth and 78% of corporate stock (see source2). Look how the racket works: Fail to collect fair taxes on corporate profit. Distribute that lightly-to-zero-taxed revenue as dividends. Dividends overwhelmingly flow to the top of the income spectrum. Lightly tax dividends (at 15% at the moment). The result? Watch the share of wealth balloon for the wealthy! ("The power of compound interest", Buffett would say.)

A further benefit of the racket: That top 10% own the vast majority of bonds as well. Fail to collect fair taxes from them and leave them with more discretionary income to spend as they will. Well, there is only so much Bordeaux and caviar to be consumed in a year, so this class gets to snap up those treasury bonds with their excess uncollected tax dollars. Federal debt balloons as a result of the tax giveaway, the wealthy fund the debt with the money not otherwise collected from them, and the rest get to watch a growing portion of what we still pay in taxes flow into their pockets in the form of interest payments. What a racket!!

When will we have our Bastille Day?!

And as you correctly point out, this has declined dramatically. This is a better way of measuring this phenomenon than measuring what percentage of corporations pay taxes.

Has it slowed the outsourcing of jobs? Have the local schools and infrastructures remained strong, or, are many local governments facing deteriorating streets, roads, bridges, water & sewer and other utilities?

Shell and paper entities are set up so they can legally rob anyone.

Make it impossible for a corporation to own a corporation (if corporations are artificial persons for legal purposes, isn't that slavery in the first place? A person owning a person?). Revoke their "rights", and deem them privileges, revocable at the will of the public. This means no corporate rights of free speech or assembly, no corporate right to bear arms, no corporate right to be secure in the corporate papers and effects, etc.

Corporations should not have rights. They are not persons. They are legal fictions, and it is time and past time we dealt them the hand they deserve: a two, a five, and a ten, with a flop of three aces while WE hold the fourth.

They have all the benefits of functionally immortal personhood and none of the responsibilities. It's bullshit, and it's been bullshit from the moment the ruling was made.

If a corporation can't get a colostomy, then it's not a person!!!

This issue continues to have been ignored in past selections.

What many don't realize is that we've in fact lost as much ground or more with the recent SCOTUS appointments on corporate personhood and other "welfare" issues than Roe v. Wade. At least Rehnquist stood against corporate personhood at times. This new crowd? Not a CHANCE, unless we talk folks like Feingold to ask those important questions (make that DEMAND answers to those questions), especially judges who posit themselves as "constitutional constructionists".

Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad not the synopsis that the robber barons paid the clerk of the Extreme Court to write. I do not believe that it was the intention of the Court to give perpetual person-hood to corporations.

what would constitute a "thoughtless", or "intellectually-challenged think-tank" doesn't bear thinking about.

Indeed, isn't it the case that these so-called "think-tanks" have built up an egregious reputation for hopelessly wrong analyses and prognostications?

What makes it so scary is that it confirms what history has never ceased to reiterate, namely, that what the immensely distinguished, eminently-accredited intellectual "authorities"/"experts" keep getting wrong, is not the pedantic, piecemeal steps of logic from basic premises, but the basic, most fundamental premises, themselves, that they espouse. They are our society's own hapless version of autistic savants.

They couldn't even get the name right, since, in terms of his philosophy, Smith was unequivocally the father of the mixed-economy welfare state - the precise antithesis of their claim.

the working class was gaining ground. Not anymore.

Everyone needs to see this.

their influence, their power, their ability to bend the power of this country to their will.

we hold the corporation as a golden calf -- as long as the continues -- we will continue to 'suffer' -- job insecurity, health insurance, pension, etc.

The inequities in taxation really frost my cupcakes. I wonder if the god & guns McSame lovers care that their man wants to make it even MORE lopsided?

:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

Immediately after reporting that tax experts were panning Obama's proposal to not tax seniors making less than $? because seniors were already getting enough consideration by government, they ran this report on corporations paying no taxes. Brilliant scheduling.

Ask any republican.

Too bad the republicans forget, they're also we the little people.

The Fictitious Economy, Part 1, An Interview With Dr. Michael Hudson

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=696&Itemid=1

"Junk bonds came in after 1980. Around 1980 the Carter-Volkher inflation had pushed interest rates up to 20%. There were a lot of books at the time... talking about how this spelled doom for the economy, because they couldn't see how the economy could run up any more debt... But lo and behold, here came Drexel-Burnham and its legal firms. They were essentially a group of gangsters. They said we have a way of taking over companies. We're going to borrow the money, buy up the stockholders, and instead of the companies paying dividends on their stock as they have in the past, which they have to pay after taxes, they can pay twice as much in interest. In 1980, they paid 50%, so if you had a company earning 2 million dollars a year, say, it could pay a million dollars in taxes, and a million in dividends, but once the junk bond people took it over, the company could just pay two million in interest, it could pay twice as much to the debt holders.

The banks had lobbied the government for interest to be made a tax deductible expense, so essentially the taxpayers were subsidizing the takeover of industry at very high interest charges, so high that companies had to cut back their employment, cut back their investment and downsize in order to pay the people who had taken over. There were a lot of lawsuits about this, but the courts declared that all of this was basically legal. "

holding hand while running through a field of flowers. Or laughing together. Image is so important - it costs - why pay for roads, police, fire departments, government employees and buildings when you must make yourself look good and make viewers thing that all is right with their company and the world.

See through it. Government employees are paid by us to go after us if we don't follow all the rules that corporations get in Congress and that the Pres signs or proclaims - on behalf of corporations.

Yes, see through it. Ensure profits for a few and control those rebellious citizens who want to live like they were promised and goaded into.

See through THEM.

You know, the money they WOULD be paying in taxes, so I guess they figure it all comes out even in the end ...

:sarcasm:

Bake

she spoke the truth when she said that only the Little People pay taxes.

FDR is certainly rolling in his grave at this state of affairs. And Bushco is laughing all the way to the bank.

NOT....

Too many tax loopholes for companies to drive their 'private jets' through...

And of course the gov't is going to bail out any of those same companies that 'need help'...

Enormous K & R, and OhioChick, you're awesome.

:)

...tax dodges that US and other corporations use is 'Intellectual Property' royalties. The way it works is a corporation sets up a 'dummy' subsidiary in an off-shore, non-tax, country, or perhaps a Delaware or Nevada (states that don't have corporate income taxes). They place all the company's intellectual property - patents, trademarks, etc., even the name of the company and its products and services, in that company, which then charges the rest of the corporation for the use of those patents, including the actual name of the company in commerce. The fees generally start at 5% - usually more - of total sales, a charge that is 'forgiven' in the calculation of 'net-income' performance by the officers (in other words it doesn't negatively impact their bonus structure)...and if the company is operating on a narrow margin in the first place, it could eliminate the entire annual net profit of said corporation. In one large, regional, multi-state corporation alone, this 'tax-dodge' skimmed off $30 million annually of state corporate income taxes that they would/should have otherwise paid to the states in which they operated...and that doesn't include the federal taxes avoided when those subsidiaries are set up off-shore and the 'fees' charged reduces the revenue, and the accompanying federal tax, and sends it the the corporate bottom line - that may also be incorporated out of the US...can you say Halliburton to Dubia?

pay anyway!

who the corporations are and why the year stops at 2005? Something is amiss.

Raebrek!!!

to cut the rate on capital gains on their stock investment profits on the ground that it's double taxation since the corporation pays the taxes. In fact, nobody is paying the taxes on the major part of the income in the U.S. Remember, wages have not risen. Income from stocks has risen for the CEOs.

:kick:

If we didn't make workers pay income taxes, the corporations wouldn't have to overpay them so much to make up for it.

Note: this message contains :sarcasm:
(A public service announcement for the sarcasm-impaired.)

their loyalty lies in wealth, nothing more.

I know the reality but I also see those in power of corporations talking a big shit game about being American, and how they love freedom, are pro-war, blah, blah, blah....

anyone who uses that line of thought as a defense is nothing more than a sociopath.

It is a corporation, after all.

Not surprising at all.

When I saw the story on Reuters, there was a key difference...

In the OP it says: "two-thirds of American corporations paid zero income taxes to Uncle Sam between 1998 and 2005."


In Reuters it says: "and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005."

The difference being that in the OP's story, the corps didn't pay any taxes over the eight year span, while in the Reuter's story, they only didn't pay any taxes in *at least one year* of that span. IOW, in other years, they may have.

Since a corp only pays taxes when there is a profit, the only ones to pay taxes in all those years are the ones that turned a profit *every* year. However, about 57% didn't turn a profit in at least one year. That sounds perfectly legitimate to me... there are years (especially during the dot-com burst, which is covered in this period) when companies may not have had profits.

You can argue that they should have to pay taxes on sales instead of profits, but under the existing system, this doesn't sound suspicious at all.


Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1249465620080812?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

there are no corporate taxes. I have watched accountants take my trial balance and do some switching of debits and credits here and there turning the profits into expenses and other accounting wizardry. We really need to tighten corporate law on this so the companies pay a fair share of taxes.

... things can be manipulated. However, under the current system, it's not apparent to me that the figures the GAO put out should be wrong. In fact, I'm actually somewhat amazed that over 40% of corps actually turned a profit *every* year from 1998 to 2005.

As I said, if you want to change the system, then by all means, I'm for that. But as is, I can't see why anyone is surprised by this.

Start-ups that never made money and vanished are included. I worked for one, and it had many hundreds of thousands in sales, but hemorrhaged money.

It also includes small corporations that people put together and did little with. I've known incorporated translators, for tax purposes, who try it for a tax season and dissolve the corporation or reincorporate under different rules, or even get a job.

It was requested for political purposes, the press release prior to publication is for political purposes. Often the press release would be derided were it to occur after publication. Whether or not the real intent of the agency's research arm is met--providing a foundation for informed legislation--remains to be seen.

never go near the low-income housing district.

:puke: :puke: :puke:

Close the loopholes on corporate taxation and make them pay their way.

We should call a HALT to the biggest free ride of all time!

The Republicans believe, although not as adamantly as they used to, that corporate taxation is really double taxation. The rationale is that the profits are shared with the shareholders and they are the ones who pay the corporate taxes through income and capital gains taxes and they are the ones who should pay the corporate taxes since they really are the owners.

Of course the Republicans also used this rationale to lower the capital gains taxes. That the corporations had already paid taxes and the shareholders in essence were being taxed as well and so it was double taxation. Of course in reality most corporations don't pay taxes and never have. They pay limited taxes in the form of excise and ad valorem taxes. But even then they manage to "work deals" to lower the taxes they do pay. The ones that do pay actual income taxes manage to also obtain tax credits as we saw with many of the hedge fund managers who paid taxes but also managed to earned tax credits which actually put more money in their pockets than they had to begin with. Something is wrong when you can make a profit by paying taxes but that is what many hedge fund managers have done.

Reality is we have become a nation "by the corporation, for the corporation." We are an oligarchy.

as the GAO report clearly states, that does not translate to actual taxes paid. The cold, hard, fucking truth is that slowly but surely the tax burden has been shifted to almost EXCLUSIVELY TO THE INDIVIDUAL. And once you thoroughly examine those numbers, it becomes appallingly apparent that the richer you are, the less percentage of taxes you pay. The tax laws favor the wealthy and corporations because the wealthy and corporations can spend BILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR lobbying Congress. BILLIONS. And you probably can't even get your Congressperson to send you a form letter, much less return your call. There is a war on the lower classes of this country. And by lower classes, I mean ANYONE THAT IS NOT IN THE TOP 10% TAX BRACKET. And in this war one of the chief weapons is TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. And make no mistake, unless you are in the top 10% of the income of this country, you ARE NOT REPRESENTED IN CONGRESS.

We are in the process of the largest transfer of wealth is this country's history. NO, not T. Boone Nosepicker's petroleum wealth transfer. I'm talking about the transfer of this country's wealth to the wealthiest top 5% of citizens.

The vast majority of "corporations" are small companies, like mine, that are structured to not retain corporate profits, but pass along the profits to the shareholders, whether it be one person, a few, or thousands.

If my company has $10,000 in profit at the end of the fiscal year, and retains it, it's taxed at something like 30%, leaving $7000, which if it is then paid to me as a bonus in the next year, is taxed at the individual rates, including FICA, State, City, etc. so that would be another 40% or so, getting it down to $4200 or so of after tax income.

If instead, my company pays me a bonus at the end of the fiscal year of $10,000, it reduces the "profit" of the company to roughly zero, so no corporate taxes paid. I still pay individual taxes on the higher amount, 40% of $10K, leaving $6000 or so, meaning I receive an extra $1800 just because the money was distributed when it should have been.

When a large, publicly held company pays a stock dividend, essentially it's "offloading" its profits from the fiscal year to individuals, who are taxed on that income. This is different than capital gains tax. Corporations exist not to accumulate wealth, but generate income for shareholders.

While I'm not defending Exxon or other corporations with deceptive business practices like shifting income offshore to avoid taxes, to a certain extent, this is sort of the lefty equivalent of Rush saying "a huge percentage of poor people pay no taxes" -- it's true, but it's because technically most corporations (and poor people) don't retain enough profit/income to be taxed.

which does not pay taxes on income distributed to shareholders. Large corporations are not allowed to be sub s, and they are supposed to pay taxes on income, even if that income is later distributed as dividends -- hence the wail of "double taxation" on corporate profits.

They do not pay taxes on income distributed as bonuses and salaries, because bonuses and salaries are costs to the corporation (while dividends remain profits).

Sub S was enacted to give small business owners the flexibility and limited liability of the corporate form without the double taxation, ie, the taxation of partnerships.

If we closed down ALL of the loopholes and enacted modest increases on the rates that corps and multimillionaires are supposed to pay, the combination would net a ton of cash to use on social projects.

Odd as it sounds though, I'd rather have corporations pay up at a slightly lower rate than not pay at all. As long as the aggregate taxes actually paid by the upper economic class goes up considerably, it will be fine. We sometimes forget that taxes are only a piece of the picture when it comes to America's journey from massive inequality to postwar middle class and back to inequality. We need to look at things such as union rights, regulations, education, healthcare and social norms on Wall Street if we fully want to bring about a second Great Compression as Paul Krugman suggests.

If all of the owners of a company are also employees, it is simple to avoid paying corporate income taxes. You simply pay out all of the available funds to the employees as bonuses before the end of the tax year. I believe that is common with small businesses.

for news because they won't report anything the Repubs don't clear like this GAO report.

Press releases often gloss over important details or are misleading.

Take "The study says about two-thirds of American corporations paid zero income taxes to Uncle Sam between 1998 and 2005", for example. It's perfectly correct. But probably not on the most common interpretation. The interpretation that's almost certainly intended is harder to arrive at.

This isn't the place, however, for a lecture on the different kinds of ordered tuplets you get when quantifying over the constituent parts of the verb's event structure, so I'll pass on that particular pleasure.

McCain and company want to claim that we're the ones going to be tough on the middle class and raise their taxes.

If Joe Average is paying taxes, I don't think he's going to love the idea that Corporationg Huge pays none - AND gets treated in many other ways like an individual.

The right loves to rattle on about being patriotic, and about how they, of course, have a better idea of what a "real American" is supposed to be.

You know what my idea of a patriotic American is? Someone that pays their F**king taxes, and F**king likes it because they are paying to support the "greatest nation on Earth." I'm so damn tired of those sorry little bitches whining about how much they have to pay in taxes. They want their cake, our cake, everbody elses' cake, and by God they'll eat it all.

If we do nothing but cut taxes, and never work to pay down our debt (much less cover the yearly budget) then this nation WILL FAIL.

Why do they hate America?

I thought that criticism of the government was something that we allowed and encouraged.

You and I may not think that the rich are taxed enough, but that doesn't change the fact that the rich are entitled to complain about how much they pay. The first amendment still applies, even to the rich. If we can complain about Bush and the Repubs, then they can complain about taxes.

*That's* what makes our country great.

who aren't totally kool-aid infested from head to toe - this is the kind of story that should make them disgusted...


mclame/mcsame/mcwar & more at ---
www.cafepress.com/warisprofitable

and was filtered by the WebSense firewall....for the whole country of Saudi Arabia, where I'm currently working...would've liked to see your designs. Kind of apropos to the discussion, eh?

put us in, yes. thank you for trying to look at them. In the DU Marketplace I have some links, with some images, but I would then assume they're blocked too, since the links originate from cafepress.

Thanks though!

others from cafepress are fine.
I jumped around and some stores are censored, some aren't, and it affects both right wing and left wing merchandise.

Here's the filter returned:

The Websense category "Racism and Hate" is filtered.

wth? how do I go about addressing that, you think? There's certainly no racism. I call B*sh a 'fuktard' on a sticker which has sold repeatedly over the past few years, but hatred? Bizarre. They don't like being slammed apparently. If anyone has ideas about this, or you do, please let me know, as I think that it's unfair to say I promote hatred. You can see some of my other designs at www.cafepress.com/mcsame08 you certainly should be able to get in there, as it only shows the two heads and the words mcsame. Also, www.cafepress.com/mclame08

thanks

I guess the richest people just have bigger boats.

saying how we have the 2nd highest corp tax rate (regardless of how many actually pay that rate) and that he promises to lower it. :eyes:

is being audited by the IRS....
(I take him grocery shopping at least once a month just to make sure there's something in that frig...)

unabashed capitalism....it's all about socializing the risk and privatizing the profits.

:nuke:

I wrote up a blog post on The Economic Populist going into the details.

Bottom line is they cannot determine precisely what is going on, especially with abuses as well as incentives to offshore outsource.

Let me see if I understand this. Corporations need corporate welfare and tax credits to cover expenses, while they have their executives donate huge sums to the major parties, insuring the continuation of the "party" of corporate control and domination of our society and culture.

Throw us, the little people in jail, taser us, break our legs when we demonstrate, tell us we're stupid, that if we don't like the police we are "bigots" (a DUer recently told me this), that we need more education, that we need drug testing in the workplace because we're not trusted, all the while corporations are on the public payroll, socializing losses and privatizing profits to a few well-connected cronies, who among other gradiose royalties ends up in huge donations to the political parties so that these corporations can keep beating us down and breaking our legs and telling us we're liars and druggies and in need of "surveillance".

But if we point this out, we're "bigots". If we don't like educated people because they lie for their employers and slip the knife continually in our backs, then we're bigots simply because we want some honesty and equal treatment, which we never get from our corporate rulers.

So that leaves tax credits as the reason 2/3 of American companies pay no federal income tax. An how do these tax credits may their way into law? That, my friend, is the classic earmark your Congressman and Senator are putting in bills at the last minute.

Having said that, not all tax credits are bad. For instance, tax credits as an incentive to produce alternate energy are worthwhile and represent sound policy. Most of these tax credits, however, are nothing more than a rebate check to offset taxes rightfully owed. Those need to be ended.

Compensation package for the year (or maybe for top 5 highest paid employees) as well as lobbyist money spent (say you pay tax equal to 5 times what you pay on lobbyists)?

Also a minimum local tax to all retail companies that set up shop there - so local politicos don't get bamboozled into giving huge tax breaks to lure companies in. And companies can not pretend to collect local sales tax which the local politicos have allowed them to keep.

So if a company has an operating loss but pays outrageous compensation packages for it's highest paid employees, or spends huge amounts on lobbying - well they'll have to factor in the tax hit, too.