America's 50 Biggest Corporations Hiding Over $1 Trillion Overseas. CORPORATE AMERICA, THE REAL "WELFARE QUEEN"

AS YOU CAN SEE, "WE, THE PEOPLE" BEAR THE BIGGEST TAX BURDEN AND WE, NOT BIG COMPANIES, KEEP THIS NATION RUNNING.


Over the past several decades, corporations have been paying a smaller and smaller share of taxes, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. In 1952, corporate income taxes funded about 32 percent of the federal government. That shrank to 10.6 percent by 2015. While tax havens aren’t the sole cause of this shift, it’s worth noting that the share of corporate profits reported in tax havens has increased tenfold since the 1980s.

Corporate tax dodgers are the real welfare cheats

DOES ANYONE REALLY KNOW HOW MUCH THEY'VE HIDDEN AWAY?
NO....

Other organizations have come up with slightly different numbers using similar research methods.

A March study from the Citizens for Tax Justice found that the 500 largest corporations are holding $2.4 trillion overseas, allowing them to avoid paying $695 billion in taxes.

[IF AVERAGE CITIZEN WAS BUSTED CHEATING LIKE THIS, THAT CITIZEN WOULD LIKELY GO TO FEDERAL PRISON, BUT NOT THE BIG WALL STREET NAMES!]

The sum, larger than the economic output of Russia, South Korea and Spain, is held in an ‘opaque and secretive network’ of 1,608 subsidiaries based offshore, said Oxfam.

Technology and pharmaceutical companies, for example, often create subsidiaries in tax havens like Bermuda, to which they transfer the intellectual property and patents that earn them a large share of their total profits. Companies whose workforces and sales are primarily in the U.S. and other high-tax nations end up claiming that a disproportionate share of their profits were earned overseas.

Another tactic that has grown more popular in recent years, but which has also come under increased scrutiny, is corporate inversion. American companies that “invert” acquire foreign firms in order to reincorporate in lower-tax countries.

APRIL 14, 2016

A government report revealed on Wednesday that a significant percentage of large, profitable U.S. corporations pay no federal taxes at all.

A study released Thursday gives fresh insight into some of the practices that make those light tax burdens possible.

The 50 largest U.S. corporations currently stash about $1.4 trillion in offshore tax havens, according to the analysis by anti-poverty group OxFam America.


Between 2008 and 2014, these titans of big business — a group that includes Apple, Coca-Cola and Disney — together received approximately $27 in federal loans or similar aid for every $1 they paid in federal taxes, OxFam America calculated.

All together, the 50 biggest companies’ overseas tax avoidance techniques allowed them to pay an effective corporate income tax rate of 26.5 percent during those years, the nonprofit estimates.

That is well below the 'official' top rate of 35 percent.  

Thanks to a tax “deferral” loophole, U.S. companies only pay domestic taxes on foreign earnings if they “repatriate” the earnings by bringing them back to the U.S. That gives companies a particular incentive to hoard money elsewhere — sometimes indefinitely — in order to defer taxation.

[I'LL GIVE YOU JUST 3 GUESSES WHO CREATED THESE LOOPHOLES FOR WALL STREET....THINK BIG CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS.]

"It’s absolutely the way that the U.S. Congress wrote the U.S. tax system. "

FROM THE HERALD TRIBUNE,
"A study released Thursday says that for each dollar America's 50 biggest companies paid in federal taxes between 2008 and 2014, they received $27 back in federal loans, loan guarantees and bailouts.
The study was compiled by Oxfam America and it comes on top of a mountain of evidence from international agencies and economic journals underscoring the degree to which major companies have rigged the tax code.
John Oliver has a point when he says, “If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.”

The beneficiaries of tax distortions are counting on you to fall asleep, but this is a topic as important as it is dry.The tax system is rigged against us precisely because taxation is the Least Sexy Topic on Earth. So we doze, and our pockets get picked.
It's because the issues seem arcane that corporate lobbyists get away with murder. The Oxfam report says that each $1 the biggest companies spent on lobbying was associated with $130 in tax breaks and more than $4,000 in federal loans, loan guarantees and bailouts.

$111 BILLION LOST EACH YEAR  

One academic study found that tax dodging by major corporations costs the U.S. Treasury up to $111 billion a year.

By my math, less than one-fifth of that annually would be more than enough to pay the additional costs of full-day pre-kindergarten for all 4-year-olds in America ($15 billion), prevent lead poisoning in tens of thousands of children ($2 billion), provide books and parent coaching for at-risk kids across the country ($1 billion) and end family homelessness ($2 billion).

[BUT AMERICANS WOULD RATHER CODDLE CORPORATIONS.]

The Panama Papers should be a wake-up call, shining a light on dysfunctional tax codes around the world — but much of the problem has been staring us in the face. Among the 500 corporations in the Standard &Poor's 500 index, 27 were both profitable in 2015 and paid no net income tax globally, according to an analysis by USA Today.

U.S. companies game the system in many ways, including shifting profits to overseas tax havens.

In 2012, U.S. companies reported more profit in low-tax Bermuda than in Japan, China, Germany and France combined, even though their employees in Bermuda account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of their worldwide totals.

Overall, the share of corporate taxation in federal revenue has declined since 1952 from 32 percent to 11 percent. In that same period, the portion coming from payroll taxes, which hit the working poor, has climbed.

But we have created perverse incentives: CEOs have a responsibility to shareholders to make money, and tax dodging accomplishes that.

This isn't individual crookedness but an entire political/economic system that induces companies to rip off fellow citizens quite legally.

It's now widely recognized that corporations have manipulated the tax code.

The U.S. Treasury, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and professional economic journals are all trying to respond to issues of tax evasion.   
[RESPOND? BS! THEY'RE ALL AIDING AND ABETTING THIS THING!]

When congressional Republicans like Ted Cruz denounce the IRS, they empower corporate tax cheats.

Because of IRS cuts, the amount of time revenue agents spend auditing large companies has fallen by 34 percent since 2010.

A Syracuse University analysis finds that the lost revenue from the decline in corporate audits may be as much as $15 billion a year
The big problem of welfare dependency in America now involves entitled corporations.

So let's help those moochers in business suits pick themselves up and stop sponging off the government."

THE FACTS ARE STAGGERING

Just 62 individuals now have the same wealth as 3.6 billion people – half of ALL humanity.

This figure is down from 388 individuals as recently as 2010.
These dramatic statistics are just the latest evidence that today we live in a world with dangerous and growing levels of inequality.



This inequality is fueled by an economic and political system that benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of the rest, causing the gains of economic growth over the last several decades to go disproportionately to the already wealthy. 

TO FIX THIS,NATIONS WHO HELP HIDE CORPORATE PROFITS WOULD HAVE TO COME CLEAN.    

“We would need cooperation from foreign governments to overhaul the system,” Craig Boise, the dean of Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law says.
But many of them don’t have an incentive to do that, because facilitating offshore accounting is such a dependable source of revenue for them.

"Every time a new rule is created to crack down on abuse," he says, "companies find another way around it. It’s like constantly playing a game of catch-up,” 

AND CONGRESS ALWAYS FINDS A WAY TO HELP THOSE WITH 'DEEP POCKETS' SO THEY CAN HAVE MORE PROFITS TO SPEND TO FUND THOSE EXPENSIVE CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGNS.

IT'S CROOKS HELPING OTHER CROOKS AND IT'S BEEN THIS WAY SINCE WALL STREET BOUGHT THE U.S. CONGRESS... MANY DECADES AGO.  

AMERICANS DIDN'T STOP IT WHEN IT STARTED... HOW ABOUT NOW? 
HAVE YOU PAID ENOUGH YET TO KEEP THE CORPORATE MOOCHERS MOOCHING OFF YOU AND YOUR INCOMES?

IF WE DON'T DEMAND A CHANGE IN THE TAX CODE, WE'LL BE PAYING FOR OUR SILENCE ALL OUR LIVES.

THAT MAKES US SLAVES... THAT MAKES CONGRESS AND BIG BUSINESS OUR MASTERS.

As US Uncut has previously reported, the pharmaceutical industry costs taxpayers roughly $270 billion a year when accounting for the cost we pay for life-saving drugs whose patents have been bought up by Big Pharma.

This is over $1,914 per household in corporate welfare.

This is partly due to the Medicare Part D bill that George W. Bush signed into law in 2003, which prevents Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.

But the biggest drug companies also make a pretty penny (a combined $711 billion in profits between 2003 and 2012) by buying patents for drugs that were largely developed with taxpayer-funded research, then jacking up the price by absurd amounts after cornering the market.

THE STATES ALSO HAND OUT SUBSIDIES, ALL STATES.
In 2012, the New York Times did an analysis of every existing tax break in each of the 50 states and learned that 1,874 programs cost taxpayers $80.4 billion every year for corporate welfare in their state.
In 2013, Bloomberg estimated the ten biggest TBTF banks suck up $83 billion per year in corporate welfare.

In 2015, the House of Representatives voted to revive the Export-Import (Ex-Im) bank, which has been maligned as a slush fund for large, multinational corporations.

In its most recent year, the Ex-Im bank had a $112 billion portfolio, of which $90 billion went to multinationals.

If that wasn’t bad enough, a huge portion of that money went to just 10 wealthy corporations.

So we pay them so they can pay each other?

The biggest 200 corporations have an excessively unfair advantage over their competitors due to their influence in Washington. According to the Sunlight Foundation, the top 200 companies spent a combined $5.8 billion on lobbying Congress between 2007 and 2012. And in those same years, those companies received $4.4 trillion in federal contracts.

That $4.4 trillion is $100 billion more than what the U.S. government spent on providing a basic income to the nation’s 50 million Social Security recipients.

The combined cost of these 10 corporate welfare programs is $1.539 trillion per year.


The three main programs needy families depend upon — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ($17.3 billion), food stamps ($74 billion), and the Earned Income Tax Credit ($67.2 billion) — cost just $158.5 billion in total.


This means we spend ten times as much on corporate welfare and handouts to the top 1 percent than we do on welfare for working families struggling to make ends meet.
Just this week...
USA Today assembled a list of 27 multinational corporations that posted between $56 million and $4.6 billion in profits in 2015, yet got money back from the government rather than paying federal taxes.

While residents of Flint, Michigan are still having to pay for toxic water, still being charged by the gallon, less than two hundred miles away, multi-billion dollar corporation Nestle has been pumping millions of gallons out of Lake Michigan for free.

In fact, they receive 13 million dollars in tax breaks to do so.
So not only do low income Flint residents technically pay more for Michigan water than Nestle, but now they’re also forced to buy bottled water FROM Nestle.


HOW CAN THAT BE OKAY IN ANYONE'S MIND?

The next time you hear someone complain about how the poor get “all this free stuff,” show them this.

FOR BOTH PROGRAMS, "FOOD STAMPS" AND "WELFARE", AVERAGE WORKERS SHELL OUT UNDER $50 IN A YEAR, BUT HAVE TO PAY $4,000 EVERY YEAR TO HELP THE TOP BUSINESSES, THE ONES WITH THE MOST PROFITS, THE ONES WHO TOOK AMERICAN JOBS OVERSEAS....

WE'RE GIVING GIANT CORPORATIONS MORE THAN WE'RE SPENDING ON DEFENSE.

WE'RE HANDING OUT MORE OF OUR OWN MONEY (TO MAKE IT EASIER FOR BIG BUSINESS TO TAKE MORE JOBS AWAY FROM AMERICANS) THAN IT TAKES TO RUN SOME COUNTRIES.

AS MY UNCLE WOULD SAY,
"THAT MAKES YOU ABOUT 10 KINDS OF CRAZY!"









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SEE ALSO:

How McDonald's and Wal-Mart Became Welfare Queens - Bloomberg

Meet America's Biggest Welfare Queens

The United States of subsidies: The biggest corporate winners