The Corporations that are Robbing your Children
It’s time we stopped America’s most profitable companies from running up the deficit and debt
Would it surprise you to 
know that $7.5 billion of the taxes you paid were redistributed back to some of America’s largest corporations as “tax refunds?” Would you believe that this same group of America’s most profitable companies paid nothing in taxes? How could that be? To understand, you’ll have to jump into the numbers. It’s a wonky trip but entirely worth the effort. I promise.
As Republicans tell it, taxes are way too high, especially taxes on America’s corporations. “We have the highest corporate tax rates in the world,” they bellow. But what they don’t say that we have some of the lowest corporate tax collections in the world.
The current corporate tax rate is roughly 35%. But deductions and loopholes Slap-Chop that tax bill until it’s no longer recognizable. Afterward, the U.S. corporate tax collection rate is about 10 percent. None of our European competitors has a lower rate of corporate tax collection.
In truth, we have a revenue problem. And our under-taxing problem begins with some of America’s most well-known corporations—names like Coca Cola, Verizon, Dow, Prudential, Ford, Boeing, General Electric, e-Bay and others. They are robbing your children—directly robbing their future—through both legal and questionable tax loopholes like off-shoring profits and accelerated depreciation.
Off-shoring is any of a number of strategies for hiding profits overseas. Accelerated depreciation is an accounting trick aimed at making tax-deductible expenses look higher than they really are. These are only two of a bagful of mostly legal strategies that companies use to avoid paying taxes, even when they run up record profits. Even when they do it by betting against economic recovery.
Now comes a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. Things have become so screwed up that among the 100 highest-paid U.S. CEOs, one in four took home more personal pay than their company paid in U.S. taxes. Who are they? To the list above add International Paper, Motorola, Black and Decker, Prudential, Honeywell, Capital One, Qwest, and others. These companies have a big role in our consumer life. You’d find it very hard to boycott the entire list. Yet they’re some of our very worst corporate citizens.
In 2010 these companies made $47.5 billion in net profits. They paid about $417 million in CEO Salaries. And together, they paid minus $7,606 million in taxes. You read that correctly, on $47.5 billion in profits they collectively received a tax refund of over $7.5 billion. They made a profit on taxes. In fact, on top of huge profits, they increased their bottom lines another 6.3 percent straight out of your pocket.
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