posted August 06, 2011 01:09 PM            

and once again, nothing wrong with rich people using coupons. why is it necessary to deliberately misconstrue what i said?

but... george lucas an employee of a corporation? maybe on paper! lucas is one of the rich who hires AMERICAN labour and pays them extremely well no matter what their position. and he votes democrat, taxes and all. of COURSE he also uses loopholes...and coupons!

however there is a difference between ME using all the deductions available - so i have SOMETHING left to live on - and someone siphoning off every penny, like warren buffet, so they can pay less taxes than their employees - by his own admission!

and since trusts are not exclusive to the wealthy but only those who HAVE SOMETHING bother with them, it is RIDICULOUS to scream about "death taxes" and "too many taxes" when the trust covers a great deal of any collateral damage those things MIGHT cause. but the conservative media is FULL of screaming about overtaxing the rich as if they don't know how to take care of these small hurdles.

if i earned 300K a year, yess, i would be happy to pay $1500 more so that someone who CAN"T work can still eat.

that said i understand the amount of fraud in the system, and that some people could try harder to find work. i know some of them too and they know what i think about it.

posted August 07, 2011 06:35 PM            

but the tax haven category is about right. why else would all those multinational corporations, hedge fund managers and firms be based here? when they shop labour and parts abroad where they are cheaper? you think they are here for the scenery?

posted August 08, 2011 08:59 AM            

Ummmm, what garbage was sold to "working and middle class Americans"?

As I recall, it was the Community Reinvestment Act passed by the former "worst president in US history" which was responsible for the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac...demoscat run government created entities...which kicked off the financial debacle. Banks and other mortgage lenders were threatened by congress and the justice dept to make loans on functionally obsolete properties TO people who couldn't make the mortgage payments. O'Bomber even sued a bank or banks to force them to make loans which didn't meet their mortgage lending guidelines.

And then, there was ACORN, another demoscat organization which not only was attempting to overthrow the election laws and election process in America; they were also brokering those sub-prime loans for people who couldn't make their mortgage payments.

Eventually, those sub-prime loans were packaged or bundled and financial instruments called "credit default swaps" were sold to investors all across the world. The Income Tax Evader, Timothy Geithner..demoscat...worked on the pricing equations for those "credit default swaps". Little Timothy did such a good job that O'Bomber appointed him Sec of Treasury.

We could have avoided most of this mess if the federal government had simply declared all those "credit default swaps" to be a form of unauthorized gambling, unwound them and made the issuers refund all the money to investors.

But, if government is going to get involved in telling businesses WHAT business they must engage in and telling businesses who they must lend to, and where they must lend...then, government must also be responsible for the failures and the cost of failures.

The moral of this story is..."DON'T SEND BUSYBODY MORONS TO CONGRESS AND don't elect one of them as president of the United States.

posted August 08, 2011 04:27 PM            

And the new requirements needed to register and vote. (I will remind that in the last election less than 10 cases of voter fraud were reported nationally) point of fact it was 4.

But back to our topic....america is most definitely a tax haven.
--How the rich are soaking us.

Cost Of Tax Cuts For America's Rich Exceeds Value Of Budget Cuts

Rich People’s Taxes Have Little to Do with Job Creation

U.S. Tax Rates_then and now.

I could go on but I am talking to a Leonine brick.

posted August 10, 2011 06:39 AM            

But, Socialism in any of it's forms simply doesn't work and eventually comes unstuck.

If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth

The idea that a capitalist economy can support a socialist welfare state is collapsing before our eyes, says Janet Daley.
Janet Daley
9:00PM BST 06 Aug 2011

Which of these is the most important question to ask in the present economic crisis: how can we promote growth? Should we pay off government debt more or less quickly? Is the US in worse trouble than Europe? Answer: none of the above.

The truly fundamental question that is at the heart of the disaster toward which we are racing is being debated only in America: is it possible for a free market economy to support a democratic socialist society? On this side of the Atlantic, the model of a national welfare system with comprehensive entitlements, which is paid for by the wealth created through capitalist endeavour, has been accepted (even by parties of the centre-Right) as the essence of post-war political enlightenment.

This was the heaven on earth for which liberal democracy had been striving: a system of wealth redistribution that was merciful but not Marxist, and a guarantee of lifelong economic and social security for everyone that did not involve totalitarian government. This was the ideal the European Union was designed to entrench. It was the dream of Blairism, which adopted it as a replacement for the state socialism of Old Labour. And it is the aspiration of President Obama and his liberal Democrats, who want the United States to become a European-style social democracy.

But the US has a very different historical experience from European countries, with their accretions of national remorse and class guilt: it has a far stronger and more resilient belief in the moral value of liberty and the dangers of state power. This is a political as much as an economic crisis, but not for the reasons that Mr Obama believes. The ruckus that nearly paralysed the US economy last week, and led to the loss of its AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s, arose from a confrontation over the most basic principles of American life.

Contrary to what the Obama Democrats claimed, the face-off in Congress did not mean that the nation’s politics were “dysfunctional”. The politics of the US were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended: the legislature was acting as a check on the power of the executive.

The Tea Party faction within the Republican party was demanding that, before any further steps were taken, there must be a debate about where all this was going. They had seen the future toward which they were being pushed, and it didn’t work. They were convinced that the entitlement culture and benefits programmes which the Democrats were determined to preserve and extend with tax rises could only lead to the diminution of that robust economic freedom that had created the American historical miracle.

And, again contrary to prevailing wisdom, their view is not naive and parochial: it is corroborated by the European experience. By rights, it should be Europe that is immersed in this debate, but its leaders are so steeped in the sacred texts of social democracy that they cannot admit the force of the contradictions which they are now hopelessly trying to evade.

No, it is not just the preposterousness of the euro project that is being exposed. (Let’s merge the currencies of lots of countries with wildly differing economic conditions and lock them all into the interest rate of the most successful. What could possibly go wrong?)

Also collapsing before our eyes is the lodestone of the Christian Socialist doctrine that has underpinned the EU’s political philosophy: the idea that a capitalist economy can support an ever-expanding socialist welfare state.

As the EU leadership is (almost) admitting now, the next step to ensure the survival of the world as we know it will involve moving toward a command economy, in which individual countries and their electorates will lose significant degrees of freedom and self-determination.

We have arrived at the endgame of what was an untenable doctrine: to pay for the kind of entitlements that populations have been led to expect by their politicians, the wealth-creating sector has to be taxed to a degree that makes it almost impossible for it to create the wealth that is needed to pay for the entitlements that populations have been led to expect, etc, etc.

The only way that state benefit programmes could be extended in the ways that are forecast for Europe’s ageing population would be by government seizing all the levers of the economy and producing as much (externally) worthless currency as was needed – in the manner of the old Soviet Union.

That is the problem. So profound is its challenge to the received wisdom of postwar Western democratic life that it is unutterable in the EU circles in which the crucial decisions are being made – or rather, not being made.

The solution that is being offered to the political side of the dilemma is benign oligarchy. Ignoring national public opinion and turbulent political minorities has always been at least half the point of the EU bureaucratic putsch. But that does not settle the economic predicament.

What is to be done about all those assurances that governments have provided for generations about state-subsidised security in old age, universal health provision (in Britain, almost uniquely, completely free), and a guaranteed living standard for the unemployed?

We have been pretending – with ever more manic protestations – that this could go on for ever. Even when it became clear that European state pensions (and the US social security system) were gigantic Ponzi schemes in which the present beneficiaries were spending the money of the current generation of contributors, and that health provision was creating impossible demands on tax revenue, and that benefit dependency was becoming a substitute for wealth-creating employment, the lesson would not be learnt. We have been living on tick and wishful thinking.

So what are the most important truths we should be addressing if we are to avert – or survive – the looming catastrophe? Raising retirement ages across Europe (not just in Greece) is imperative, as is raising thresholds for out-of-work benefit entitlements.

Lowering the tax burden for both wealth-creators and consumers is essential. In Britain, finding private sources of revenue for health care is a matter of urgency.

A general correction of the imbalance between wealth production and wealth redistribution is now a matter of basic necessity, not ideological preference.

posted August 10, 2011 11:35 AM            

perhaps this belongs here more than in the british thread ...

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/conservatism-murders-suicides/

posted August 10, 2011 03:00 PM            

loophole [ˈlu¢°pˌhəʊl]
n
1. an ambiguity, omission, etc., as in a law, by which one can avoid a penalty or responsibility

If you're evading your 35% corporate tax through legal manuevers, you're still exploiting loopholes.

posted August 10, 2011 03:36 PM            

Now if they want to do away will all loopholes...including subsidies for producing ethanol and other so called "green" projects and if they want to get rid of all federal payments to special interest groups of every variety, then I would be for it.

posted August 10, 2011 04:31 PM            

quote:

---

Just because a lay person refers to a tax break as a loophole doesn't make it so.

---

Similarly, just because a layperson chooses not to label a means of not paying the full corporate tax rate a loophole, doesn't make it so.

quote:

---

And if companies are sitting on money, it must be private companies, because corporations will be taxed at the maximum rate on any money they retain.

---

posted August 10, 2011 06:04 PM            

*I looked at Boeing's Financials on Yahoo, 2007 to date. They average around 30+% tax expense. I think you are confusing cash flow timing differences between book basis and tax basis on when taxes are actually paid and when they are expensed. if a Company has an NOL of $100 million one year and the a taxable profit of $100 million and one dollar the next year and pay 35 cents in taxes the second year, their rate is not 0.0000035% on $100 million, it is 35%.

*Your headline couldn't possibly be any greater of a lie or exaggeration.

If you had said: companies that pay almost no corporate income tax, that would have at least been accurate.

So how much total tax does Amazon pay, between paying taxes on the goods they purchase and resell, to paying taxes on their huge employee count (FICA baby), to paying taxes on the massive infrastructure they operate (hardware, bandwidth, data center tech, etc) to paying taxes on their property / real estate.

What you really mean, is that after getting their brains taxed out, these corporations pay very little tax on the money they're allowed to keep after getting tax raped in two dozen other ways.

*Oh boy. Two of these companies are REITs. Gus, do you realize that REITs do NOT pay corporate income tax by the simple fact that they are REITs? Ever heard of any REIT legislation? REITs act effectively as pass-throughs and their shareholders pay tax on REIT income at the shareholder's tax rate.

They are only liable to pay taxes on certain non-qualified income, which income is limited by legislation to being a small (20% or less) percentage of their total income.

One would think the Capital IQ and NY Times people would also have figured this out, but putting them on this list - really? Gussy, did you do ANY research or googling on this before hitting the send button?

*Gus,

by "pre-tax income" are you referring to taxable income or financial statement income? because there's a huge difference.

one means that there are huge tax credits that wipe out a significant portion of the tax liability. the other means that there may be significant items that have different treatment for book purposes vs. tax purposes which may accelerate deductions.

*OK,

This one is real BS.
They take a company's WW sales, not US sales , and apply the percentage of tax on WW.

Companies owe tax in the country where the product is SOLD !!!

Very Unfair article.

*If you run a business especially one that has a tremendous amount of overhead like most of those businesses do, your tax right-offs can be quite large. That doesn't mean that they don't perform a corporate good to society. They pay a hell of a lot of payroll taxes which are not included in the income tax total. You can imagine that Boing purchases billions of dollars of aluminum that is made by others and who pay taxes in their own company. To get a better idea of how much is paid in taxes from all sources, you need to look at their balance sheets. This "taxation" percentage does not tell the whole story which is pretty typical for writers who want nothing more than to start some taxpayer envy or anger.

*It's profits that get taxed, not income.

This is just the same old leftist propaganda.

Why do these types have such a problem with being honest?

posted August 10, 2011 06:17 PM            

why should I pay any income tax after all the sales tax etc that i have paid? after paying into social security that is now seen as an "entitlement"? as if entitlement were about being spoiled and gifts from the higher ups!

the reason SS and medicare are called "entitlements" is that AFTER paying into them for all your working life you ARE entitled to your fair share BACK.

as i understand it the original intent of the income tax was to tax the INCOME OF CORPORATIONS, not PERSONS. isn't that one of the arguments used in legal arguments against tax evasion charges?

posted August 10, 2011 07:07 PM            

quote:

---

If the IRS says there are no loopholes and that loophole is a word used by promoters of illegal tax schemes, then that is a great authority to rely on as to a working definition.

---

What are you going on about? If you're going to claim the IRS says something, you should post the link. Republicans use the term "loophole" as well. To say it's used by promoters of illegal tax schemes, is to denigrate anyone calling for tax code changes.

With regard to your apparent cutting and pasting of other people's arguments against that article, the crux of the arguments against still don't address the fact that they pay so little compared with the tax rate they're supposed to be paying.

From the WSJ (2008):
Tax Data Highlight Corporate Loopholes

By JESSE DRUCKER
The Internal Revenue Service found that U.S. companies paid federal income taxes on their reported U.S. profits at far less than the 35% statutory rate, offering a potential revenue source for an incoming presidential administration that faces a yawning budget deficit.

Newly released data from the IRS show companies paid federal and foreign income taxes on their U.S. book income -- the amount reported to shareholders -- at a rate of 25.3% during 2005, the most recent year for which data were made available by the IRS.

Effective U.S. corporate tax rates could take on increasing importance in the months ahead for President-elect Barack Obama. Some tax experts call for tightening corporate loopholes and ending some industry tax breaks, while others say such moves could be counterproductive and end up killing jobs in an economic downturn.

Mr. Obama has publicly highlighted this issue. In the first presidential debate, he said: "There are so many loopholes that have been written into the tax code...that we actually see our businesses pay effectively one of the lowest tax rates in the world."

The information about tax rates was included in a broader IRS study that examines the gap between income reported to shareholders and the consistently lower income reported to tax authorities. Differences between accounting rules and tax laws mean companies keep two sets of books. Tax rules often allow them to take deductions on their tax returns that don't eat into their book profits reported to shareholders.

The IRS requires companies to file a form reconciling the gap between their book and taxable profits, called the Schedule M-3. U.S. companies included in the data reported about $1.35 trillion in pretax U.S. book income to their investors in 2005, but about $1.03 trillion to the IRS -- a difference of about 23%.

The 25.3% effective tax rate was calculated by comparing the actual taxes paid by companies, including foreign taxes on U.S. profits, to the U.S. book income.

The IRS data are based on filings by 38,516 U.S. companies with fiscal years that ended between July 2005 and June 2006. The data on effective tax rates were included in tables accompanying an article by IRS researchers in the trade journal Tax Notes.

The new IRS data largely exclude overseas profits, meaning lower tax rates abroad aren't the main factor driving the low effective rate on U.S. income.

Congress has repeatedly added sweeteners to the tax code to favor certain types of business activity, largely accounting for why companies don't seem to be paying taxes on their full book income. For instance, in some years large extra depreciation expenses have been a major factor in lowering companies' effective tax rates.

Another factor in 2005's lower rates, according to the IRS study, is that companies continued to benefit from favorable treatment for stock options, which didn't count against earnings reported to shareholders but did generate hefty tax deductions. New accounting rules have since narrowed that benefit. In addition, so-called reportable transactions -- deals that have some hallmark of potentially being an abusive tax shelter -- lowered U.S. companies' taxable income by $30.6 billion during 2005, the data show.

While Mr. Obama has called for closing loopholes, he also has supported the continuation of some of the biggest federal corporate tax subsidy programs, such as the research and experimentation tax credit, which is projected to cost the government $8.38 billion during fiscal year 2009, according to Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation.

Write to Jesse Drucker at jesse.drucker@wsj.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122653707274922763.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

posted August 10, 2011 07:14 PM            

and then, because it will cost money to buy the supplies, and i will be paying sales tax on those supplies, i should be exempt from any tax on the income derived AFTER expenses are accounted for, even though the expenses were SUBSIDIZED heavily and really didn't cost me diddly.

posted August 10, 2011 11:19 PM            

Nice try but no cookies and milk for you.

The United States has the highest corporate TAX RATE in the industrialized world.

Tax avoidance is a far different matter than Tax Evasion.

posted August 11, 2011 04:19 PM            

quote:

---

The United States has the highest corporate TAX RATE in the industrialized world.

---

posted August 12, 2011 06:49 AM            

let us take the statement without context.

and guess what? it is still wrong. Though mostly true.

quote:

---

For 2010, the U.S ranks second to Japan by a fraction of a percentage point -- 39.54 percent for Japan to 39.21 percent for the U.S. But that figure is already outdated: Japan has recently moved to cut its rate for 2011 by 5 percentage points, leaving the U.S. with the highest corporate tax rate among OECD nations.

---

no context needed here either. Facts are facts the U.S. is #2.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statement s/2011/jan/03/pat-toomey/pat-toomey-says-us-has-highest-corporate-tax-rates/