This story in today’s NY Times should make you sick. It says that while you made $14,200,000,000 less than General Electric last year, you paid a lot more taxes — while that corporation GOT money from the government.
The difference is that they have lots of lobbyists working the corrupt system on Capitol Hill, including former officials at the IRS, Treasury Department, and Congress. All you have is an elected representative who would push you out of the way to get to one of those lobbyists with a checkbook. The result: huge corporations get a tax code full of benefits, while the middle class in America gets screwed again.
Worse, those same politicians go around telling us that the top corporate tax rate (35%) is way too high and must be lowered to help create jobs. That’s an out and out lie, since few corporations actually pay the top rate, and most of them have moved our jobs overseas to pump up their bottom line even more. Yet, in places like Wisconsin, legislators have voted to lessen the tax burden on big companies while cutting benefits for public employees. The only way you benefit from this is if you have enough money to invest in GE stock.
Here’s my favorite quote from the NY Times piece, from General Electric spokeswoman Anna Eisele:
“GE is committed to acting with integrity in relation to our tax obligations. We are committed to complying with tax rules and paying all legally obliged taxes.”
It’s easy to say that when you wrote the tax rules to ensure that you have no legally obliged taxes.