Capitalism Screws Us - Screw Capitalism

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.
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