Shane Ryan at Paste writes—Meet the 60 Giant Corporations Who Didn't Pay a Dime in Federal Taxes Under Trump's Plan:
As someone who just came face-to-face with his 2018 tax bill this very morning, and whose hands have stopped shaking just enough to accurately pound the keys on this keyboard, the information I’m about to convey is somewhere between “vexing” and “wildly infuriating,” and is only somewhat mitigated by the fact that the injustice is so very, very expected. So brace yourselves, I guess: The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has found that 60 corporations, all of them Fortune 500 giants, paid absolutely no federal income taxes in 2018.
Now, let’s put this in context: these 60 companies earned roughly $79 billion in pre-tax income, which means that at the 21 percent rate of corporate taxation, that should account for $16.4 billion in tax revenue. There are lot of things the federal government could do with $16.4 billion—it would cover about 40 percent of the cost of making public colleges and universities tuition free under Bernie Sanders’ plan, for instance. And that’s just a handful of companies! On a smaller scale, the ongoing Flint water crisis could have been fixed years ago with $55 million—that’s million. [...]
The 60 companies (up from about 30 in the years 2008 through 2015) include a lot of the usual suspects: Amazon, General Motors, IBM, Delta, Halliburton, Netflix, Goodyear, U.S. Steel, Xcel Energy, Duke Energy, and more. ITEP goes into detail on exactly which loopholes and breaks account for the zeroed balance of each company. Here are some details on Amazon and Netflix:
Amazon reduced its income taxes by more than $1 billion in 2018 using a tax break for stock options. A June 2016 Citizens for Tax Justice report found that 315 companies in the Fortune 500 disclosed receiving benefits from this tax break, which allows companies to write off stock-option related expenses in excess of the cost they reported to shareholders and the public.[2] Netflix reduced its income taxes by $191 million using this tax break. [...]
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2011—Boehner's prebuttal: Raising taxes 'unacceptable and a nonstarter':
Boehner's statement (which I guess technically was just an announcement he plans to issue another statement) is a complete reversal of his position from last week, when he said that despite opposing tax increases, he was willing to leave them "on the table" to facilitate a discussion about long-term deficits.
His statement comes even though it's not clear what President Obama will actually propose tomorrow. Despite the Washington Post's report that Obama would endorse the Simpson-Bowles plan, both Greg Sargent and Ezra Klein are hearing otherwise. The White House is staying mum, at least publicly, saying only that Obama's plan will "be his own."
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Returning to that complicated Rule 6(e) stuff. What do the other guys think & why are they wrong? They're already fighting the subpoenas. And already gaming Facebook ads for 2020. Plus one of those Friday curveballs from the wacky world of high finance.