Average Americans have a choice at tax time. They can pay their taxes or risk going to jail for tax evasion.
America’s corporate CEOs have a different set of tax-time
choices. These CEOs can have the corporations they run pay Uncle Sam or
they can have their corporations pay more to their CEOs.
Guess which way lots of CEOs are leaning. Better yet, read Fleecing Uncle Sam, the just-released report
from the Institute for Policy Studies and Center for Effective
Government that tallies up the choices top CEOs are actually making.
This new Fleecing Uncle Sam study
looks at the 100 U.S. corporations that last year shelled out the most
in CEO pay. Of these 100 companies, 29 paid Uncle Sam less in taxes
than they paid their CEO in compensation.
How could that happen? Did these firms simply have bad
years in 2013 and end up with not much income to tax? Not exactly. In
fact, not at all. These 29 companies last year together grabbed a
robust $24 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits.
And the CEOs at these 29 companies — major outfits like
Boeing, General Motors, and Verizon — pulled in handsome paychecks for
those billions in profits. The CEOs averaged, note Fleecing Uncle Sam co-authors Sarah Anderson and Scott Klinger, an impressive $32 million each.
Top-tier American corporations, in other
words, are stiffing Uncle Sam at the same time they’re piling up
profits and extravagantly rewarding their top execs.
These corporations have no magical super powers that make
taxes disappear. They do have friends in high places — the U.S.
Congress, for one.
Over recent decades, as Fleecing Uncle Sam
relates, lawmakers have lavished upon Corporate America “lucrative
loopholes and tax credits that have taxpayers picking up the normal
costs of business that corporations used to pay for themselves,” tens
of billions in annual subsidies “for everything from company research
and development expenses to normal equipment purchases.”
Average American taxpayers are even picking up the tab for
all those tens of millions that corporations lay on their CEOs as
compensation. The current federal tax code essentially lets
corporations deduct off their taxes whatever windfalls cascade into
America’s executive suites.
Average taxpayers are picking up another
tab, too: the bill for all the public services — from highways to clean
water — that benefit everyone and every institution in our society,
corporations included. With corporations shirking their fair share at
tax time, the nation’s basic tax burden falls on average Americans.
Just how much tax shirking are corporations doing? The new Fleecing Uncle Sam report offers
one suggestive clue. If the seven largest U.S. firms that pay Uncle
Sam less than they pay their CEOs had paid taxes last year on their
profits at the standard 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate, the study
calculates, these seven companies would have owed $25.9 billion in
federal taxes.
In real-life 2013, these seven corporations, taken together
as a group, didn’t pay any federal corporate income tax. Instead, notes
Fleecing Uncle Sam, the seven gobbled up $1.9 billion in tax
refunds. The difference between what they could have paid in taxes and
what they claimed in refunds: $27.8 billion.
from here
One more look inside capitalism, how it works and why it works so well for the minority. Our aim is to get the majority to recognise this once and for all - capitalism works very well for the capitalists. With the profit motive as the prime motive it's easy to see that a system built on profit cannot work for us, the majority, who are forced to offer ourselves up as wage slaves for whatever we can get. As a majority we do have the option to work together to end the system which causes us so many problems in favour of socialism - a system of cooperation, inclusion and common ownership for the benefit of all.
JS
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