More of your MessiahRushie's bullshit. There are so many deductions the biggest companies pay no corporate tax and the smaller companies pay about half the rate. A GAO study found that in every year from 1998 to 2005, approximately 55 percent of large corporations paid no corporate income tax.
Educate me, ed. Show me the source so I can read it for myself....not that I don't believe you...
It's just that the Tax Foundation states that the GAO is not measuring apples to apples.
They found that the tax rate was 22-25%. Nowhere was it found that the
GAO stated that corporations
were paying 0 like what you stated, what they did say
that it was around 12%.
Ps....no matter how much you don't know....I don't listen to Rush......FYI
The 12% figure sure shoots down your claim that the US corporations pay the highest rate in the world. Thank you. Your source also had this little gem:"U.S. corporate tax collection totaled 2.6% of GDP in 2011, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
That was the eleventh lowest in a ranking of 27 wealthy nations."
However my info came from a different GAO report.
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08957.pdf
What GAO Found
FCDCs reported lower tax liabilities than USCCs by most measures shown in this report. A greater percentage of large FCDCs reported no tax liability in a given year from 1998 through 2005. For all corporations, a higher percentage of FCDCs reported no tax liabilities than USCCs through 2001 but differences after 2001 were not statistically significant. Most large FCDCs and USCCs that reported no tax liability in 2005 also reported that they had no current- year income. A smaller proportion of these corporations had losses from prior years and tax credits that eliminated any tax liability. By another measure, large FCDCs were more likely to report no tax liability over multiple years than large USCCs. In 2005, comparisons of FCDCs and USCCs based on ratios of reported tax liabilities to gross receipts or total assets showed that FCDCs reported less tax than USCCs.
In the 8 years from 1998 through 2005, large FCDCs in a panel data set that we analyzed consisting of tax returns that were present in the SOI corporate files in every year were more likely to report no tax liability over multiple years than large USCCs in the same panel data set. As figure 2 shows, about 72 percent of FCDCs and 55 percent of USCCs reported no tax liability for at least 1 year during the 8 years. About 57 percent of FCDCs and 42 percent of USCCs reported no tax liability in multiple years—2 or more years—and about 34 percent of FCDCs and 24 percent of USCCs reported no tax liability for at least half the study period—4 or more years.
The specific problems with the GAO report include:
We can’t check the numbers since the GAO report does not include all the data used in their main calculations. Based on the few numbers provided in the text, all calculations appear to be slightly off, perhaps due to rounding error but in all cases my calculations produce higher ETRs. Also, the GAO report fails to provide any data on total worldwide income taxes to compare against total worldwide income. However, based on the tax rate given, 16.9 percent, GAO must be assuming the total of foreign, state and local income taxes to be $62 billion. In contrast, our analysis of IRS data indicates foreign income taxes alone are at least $100 billion in every year since 2004.
One big problem, as mentioned, is failing to account for foreign taxes properly, and foreign income. GAO's 12.6 percent figure comes from dividing U.S. federal corporate tax by worldwide income. It does not count foreign taxes at all or the foreign tax credit against U.S. tax liablity. In a 2008 report, the GAO did properly account for these things, by separating domestic and foreign income as well as domestic and foreign taxes. They found that federal corporate tax as a share of corporate domestic income was 25.2 percent.
Another big problem, as mentioned, is using a measure of income that has little to no relationship to the tax base to which the corporate tax applies. GAO uses income as reported on financial statements, which is different from taxable income reported on tax returns for many legitimate reasons that GAO describes. The big differences are timing differences in the treatment of cost recovery, losses, and other items. Researchers who use financial statement data generally get around these differences by averaging multiple years of data, but the GAO says they have insufficient data to do such an average. That means the 12.6 percent figure is completely unrepresentative, and should not have been published.
Compounding the problem of using a snap-shot single year of data, GAO does not count companies with losses, but does count them when they return to profitability but have low taxes because of losses carried forward from the years in which the companies were not counted. This skews the data significantly in 2010 due to massive losses incurred during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. The GAO claims that only profitable corporations should be counted, since only they pay taxes, but this is not accurate. Corporations and the IRS often take years to resolve tax settlements, and current payments can and often do occur independent of current income. When including all corporations, including those with losses, the GAO finds that worldwide effective tax rates are roughly equal to the statutory rate of 35 percent in 2007 and 2009 (2008 is “not available”
http://taxfoundation.org/blog/gao-compares-apples-oranges-find-low-corporate-effective-tax-rate
