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McCain Forgot Corporations Don't Pay Taxes

In Friday night's debate John McCain said the tax rate in the United States on corporations is too high.

McCain must have forgotten that most corporations aren't pay any taxes at all.

The Government Accountability Office is set to release a report that says most U.S. corporations pay no federal income taxes.

And most foreign companies that do business in the United States aren't paying corporate taxes.

The study says about two-thirds of American corporations paid zero income taxes to Uncle Sam between 1998 and 2005.

An even higher percentage of foreign corporations avoided federal corporate taxes.

I don't necessarily see it that way. It might well be that a higher effective* rate would be inefficient and counterproductive. Although....it IS high time we auditted the effective rates for their relative efficiencies. I don't imagine that's happened in say....almost 8 years?

In any case there's one thing we DO know. We know that a candidate for president who's farting corporate tax CUTS out his ass, is too fulla shit to be taken seriously in terms of our economy.

*"effective" as in, what they actually pay, instead of the "marginal" rate shill that McCain's crapping on his dupe's heads.

I suspect that the same fallacy underlies the claim that the Upper 5% of income earners pay 39% of federal income taxes.

Actually ARMCX...in general, the oft-stated claim that the rich pay a relatively large share of the federal tax total, is true! But of course...that's because they take in a relatively large share of the income!

Actual truth be told though - although it's not often told - "the rich" pay a slightly smaller percentage of their income in federal taxes, than do all the rest of we "non-rich".

"At the same time, said the GAO, the firms had trillions of dollars in sales.

The study was requested by Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota. "It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," Dorgan said. "

The link within your link that had the story, hopefully in context, no longer works.

I wonder if Dorgan understands what a profit is?

If I have a thousand dollars in sales and two thousand in costs, I will not pay any taxes. Many corporations do that little in sales.

Some corporations pay billions.

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"While they were recording record profits last year, they were also writing checks to Uncle Sam to the tune of $100.7 billion -- two and a half times what they made in net profit. In fact, previous Tax Foundation research found that from 1977 to 2004, federal and state governments extracted $397 billion by taxing the profits of the largest oil companies and an additional $1.1 trillion in taxes at the pump. In today's dollars, that's $2.2 trillion. "