Tax Day Travesty
April 14, 2011
General Electric is the largest company in the country, and made worldwide profits of $14.2 billion last year, $5.1 billion from their U.S. operations. But as the New York Times reported recently, GE won’t be mailing a check to the IRS on Tax Day. In fact, they’re claiming a $3.2 billion credit.
They aren’t alone. While public services are slashed and budgets are balanced on the backs of working families, multi-billion dollar corporations are taking advantage of loopholes to get away with paying little to nothing in taxes. Here are some more examples:
- ExxonMobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.
- Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.
- Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.
- Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year.
It wasn’t always this easy for businesses to avoid paying their fair share. In 1955, corporate taxes made up 27.3% of federal revenue compared to just 8.9% today. At the same time, individual income and payroll taxes have increased from 58% to 81.5% of total federal revenue.
When big corporations skip out on their tax bills, it’s working Americans who pay the price. And as the blog at Our Fiscal Security points out, without the public systems and structures that taxes pay for, the America we know and love would cease to exist.
On April 18, thousands of union members, MoveOn members and other allies will gather all over the country to deliver tax bills to some of the largest corporations who aren’t paying their fair share and demand that our elected leaders make them pay. MoveOn calls them the “Deadbeat Dozen” — GE, Boeing, BP, FedEx, Google, Citigroup, Amazon, Chase, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, WellsFargo, and Bank of America.
