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corporate tax cuts
With Help From Trump-GOP Law, At Least 88 Big US Corporations Paid $0 in Federal Income Tax Last Year
The companies avoided more than $26.7 billion in income taxes last year, enough to give free school lunches to every child in America.
Apr 14, 2026
Dozens of America's most profitable corporations avoided paying any federal income taxes in 2025, according to an analysis out on Tuesday from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The 88 companies—which include Tesla, Southwest Airlines, Live Nation, Palantir, Citigroup, and many others listed in the S&P 500—brought in a collective $105 billion in pretax income last year.
ITEP found that 2025 saw a spike in corporate tax avoidance, enabled in part by new loopholes created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump and by his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the corporate tax rate to 21% from its previous 35%.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is expected to hand the wealthiest 1% of Americans $117 billion in tax cuts this year, while those in the bottom 95% are set to pay more in taxes while facing across-the-board cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
It also allowed multimillion- and billion-dollar corporations to find new ways to avoid paying taxes. More than half of the tax-avoiders listed in the report used a provision in the new tax law allowing companies to immediately write off capital investments, reducing their collective taxes by $11.4 billion.
Pharmaceutical and tech companies, meanwhile, were able to take advantage of tax write-offs for research and development, exempting them from approximately another $4.4 billion.
In total, the corporate tax avoidance documented in 2025 by the researchers helped to rob the public coffers of yet another $26.7 billion, enough to give every public school student a free lunch for a year, according to a University of Missouri analysis of the National School Lunch Program.
The researchers said that the full scale of corporate tax avoidance remains unclear, since corporate tax returns are not publicly available. Some companies were also excluded because they are not part of the S&P 500 or have not yet reported their 2025 taxes.
“These findings are not isolated cases—they reflect systemic deficiencies in the corporate tax code,” said Amy Hanauer, the executive director for ITEP. “Without meaningful reform, profitable corporations will continue to pay less than their fair share.”
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Analysis Shows Trump Tax Plan Would Make Rich People Richer, Working People Poorer
Economists estimated that under the GOP nominee's proposal, the "share of national income going to the top 5% would increase by around 1.6%, while the share of the bottom 50% would fall by roughly 4.8%."
Oct 03, 2024
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's proposal to further reduce the U.S. corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% would make the bottom half of the nation's income distribution poorer while boosting the fortunes of those at the very top, according to an analysis published Thursday by economists at American University.
The analysis, released just over a month before the high-stakes November 5 election, projects the hypothetical macroeconomic and distributional impacts of corporate tax rate plans put forth by Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. Harris has called for increasing the corporate tax rate to 28%.
If implemented, the economists found, Trump's plan would "modestly reduce" the nation's gross domestic product (GDP), decrease government revenue, and "significantly increase inequality," given that wealthier households "are the primary owners of corporate stocks" that would benefit from the former president's tax cuts.
The "share of national income going to the top 5% would increase by around 1.6%, while the share of the bottom 50% would fall by roughly 4.8%," the analysis estimates.
Harris' plan, by contrast, would "mildly" raise U.S. GDP, increase federal revenue, and "decrease inequality, reducing the share of income earned by the top 5% of the distribution by about 1% and increasing the share of income earned by the bottom 50% of the distribution by about 4.7%, compared to current policy."
The analysis came a day after the Congressional Budget Office released a report showing that the richest 1% saw their share of the nation's wealth grow to 27% between 1989 and 2022 while families in the bottom half of the distribution held just 6% of the country's wealth in both 1989 and 2022—a wealth gap that further slashing corporate taxes would exacerbate.
Trump's call to reduce the corporate tax rate to 15% was the "centerpiece" of an address he delivered last month at the Economic Club of New York, as Bloomberg reported at the time.
When Trump took office in 2017, the statutory corporate tax rate was 35%. Later that year, Trump and congressional Republicans rammed through an unpopular tax-cut package that slashed the corporate rate to 21% and led to a surge in tax avoidance. The law has been hugely regressive, delivering major benefits to the rich and very little to the working class.
Cutting the corporate tax rate to 15% would hand roughly $50 billion in annual tax cuts to the 100 largest and most profitable U.S. companies, according to a recent analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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GOP 'Salivating' to Ram Through Another Corporate Tax Giveaway If Trump Wins
"It's obscene," Sen. Elizabeth Warren said of Republicans' plan to hand corporations another tax cut if Trump wins in November and the GOP takes over the Senate.
Jun 10, 2024
The crowning legislative achievement of Donald Trump's first term in the White House was the passage of an unpopular tax bill that gave big corporations a massive windfall, disproportionately rewarded wealthy individuals despite being pitched as a boon for workers, and contributed trillions to the national debt.
With Trump running for another four years in power this November, Republicans are gearing up for a repeat.
The Washington Post reported Monday that "Republicans in Congress are preparing to not just extend former President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts if they win control of Washington in November's elections, but also lower rates even more for corporations."
"Now GOP lawmakers and some of Trump's economic advisers are considering more corporate tax breaks—which could expand the national debt by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade, according to researchers at Stanford University and MIT," the Post added.
The report on Republicans' plans comes a month after the Congressional Budget Office estimated that extending provisions of the 2017 tax cut law that are set to expire next year would add $4.6 trillion to the U.S. deficit.
"GOP is salivating at more handout tax cuts to their corporate bosses and billionaires that will balloon the debt," Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) wrote on social media Monday. "Fiscal irresponsibility by the guys bought and paid for by huge corporations."
During his 2020 campaign against Trump, President Joe Biden pledged to "get rid of the bulk of" the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), but he and his party have thus far failed to do so.
Slashing corporate taxes even further than the 2017 law—which cut the business rate from 35% to 21%—would reward many of the same corporations that have pushed up prices for consumers in recent years in a shameless attempt to pad their bottom lines. A recent analysis by the Groundwork Collaborative found that between April and September of last year, corporate profits drove more than half of U.S. inflation.
"Big corporations raised prices higher and faster than inflation, squeezing working families to rake in record profits," Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) wrote on social media in response to the Post's reporting. "So what's the GOP's plan? Even more corporate tax cuts and another $1 trillion to the debt. You can't make this stuff up."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) similarly criticized the GOP's plan to reward the corporations that have pushed costs onto consumers to boost their profit margins.
"The same corporations that have been price-gouging the American consumer at the grocery store, at the gas pump, and everywhere else are now spending their money loading up these Republican political action committees with the plan that the Republicans will deliver even more tax cuts," Warren told the Post on Monday. "It's obscene."
"Wealthy shareholders and executives got windfalls, workers got nothing."
Many of the country's largest, most profitable corporations already pay a tax rate that's significantly lower than the current statutory rate of 21%—if they pay any federal taxes at all.
A recent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found that the nearly 300 companies in the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 that were consistently profitable between 2013 and 2021 saw their average effective tax rate fall from 22% to 12.8% under the Trump tax law, even as their bottom lines grew.
"The number of these corporations paying tax rates of less than 10% increased from 56 to 95 after the Trump tax law went into effect," ITEP observed.
Chuck Marr, vice president of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, wrote in response to the Post story that "the 2017 tax law's centerpiece cut in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% was a complete policy failure."
"Wealthy shareholders and executives got windfalls, workers got nothing," Marr wrote, pointing to research showing that "workers below the 90th percentile of their firm's income scale—a group whose incomes were below roughly $114,000 in 2016—saw 'no change in earnings' from the rate cut" while executives saw a major boost.
Trump, who was convicted last month on 34 felony charges stemming from the falsification of business records, has not been shy about his intention to protect the wealthy and large corporations from paying their fair share in taxes.
Speaking to his rich donors at the home of billionaire hedge fund investor John Paulson in April, the former president emphasized that he would make "extending the Trump tax cuts" a top priority should he defeat Biden in November.
Andrew Bates, the Biden White House's senior deputy press secretary, noted in a memo released Monday that while Trump and his Republican allies "go to bat for the multinational corporations engaged in price gouging, they plan to slash Medicare and Social Security."
"Today's Washington Post story makes it impossible to ignore the enormous contrast between President Biden's agenda to rebuild the middle class and MAGAnomics," Bates wrote. "Republican officials who back MAGAnomics stand up for price gouging, tax giveaways for the rich, and across-the-board tariffs that would all raise prices, and they'd sell the middle class out with a skyrocketing deficit and cuts to Medicare and Social Security."
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Corporate Tax Avoidance Rampant During First 5 Years of Trump-GOP Law: Study
"Corporate tax avoidance occurs because Congress allows it to occur, and the Trump tax law made it worse," says a new study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Feb 29, 2024
Many large, profitable U.S. companies paid little to nothing in federal taxes during the first five years of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law, an unpopular measure that slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and introduced new loopholes that the rich and powerful rushed to exploit.
A study released Thursday by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) examines 342 companies that were profitable during each of the first five years of the tax law's enactment. The new research shows that corporate tax avoidance has been rampant under the law, with 23 of the companies included in the study paying nothing in federal taxes between 2018 and 2022 and 109 businesses paying nothing in at least one of the five years.
Kinder Morgan, NRG Energy, and T-Mobile were among the profitable companies that paid a 0% or negative effective tax rate during the study period.
"When President [Donald] Trump and congressional Republicans slashed the statutory corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%, they could have maintained or even increased the effective rate paid by corporations by shutting down special breaks and loopholes in the corporate income tax," reads the new report. "But from the very beginning of the debate over the 2017 legislation, it was clear their goal was to allow corporations to contribute less to the public investments and the society that makes their profits possible."
Nearly a quarter of the companies analyzed by ITEP "paid effective tax rates in the single digits or less" during the law's first five years, including prominent corporations such as Netflix, Nike, and Citigroup.
ITEP found that the "industries enjoying the lowest five-year effective tax rates were utilities (negative 0.1%); oil, gas, and pipelines (2.0%); motor vehicles (3.2%); and telecommunications (7.7%)."
On average, the 342 companies included in the analysis paid an effective tax rate of 14.1% between 2018 and 2022—significantly less than the 21% statutory rate established by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
The difference between what companies would have paid in taxes if they were held to the 21% statutory rate and what they actually paid amounts to a major taxpayer subsidy, ITEP said. The 342 companies received a combined $275 billion in subsidies during the first five years of the Trump-GOP tax law, with the majority going to just 25 companies.
Bank of America received the largest tax break of all the companies analyzed—$23.89 billion.
"For many of the biggest corporations in America, our 21% tax rate is an accounting fiction," said Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at ITEP and the lead author of the new study. "Because of an array of special-interest tax breaks, the most profitable corporations in America routinely pay effective tax rates far below the legal rate."
"It does not have to be this way. Congress should take more steps to crack down on this widespread corporate tax avoidance."
While corporate tax avoidance certainly didn't begin with the 2017 tax law, ITEP's study notes that it "did little to change" the status quo—"except to allow companies to pay less than ever."
"Corporate tax avoidance occurs because Congress allows it to occur, and the Trump tax law made it worse," the analysis says.
Some notorious tax avoiders, such as Amazon, were excluded from the study because they reported a loss during at least one of the five years that ITEP examined. Amazon paid an effective tax rate of 8.9% between 2018 and 2022.
"Americans who heard President Trump and his supporters in Congress tout the 21% corporate income tax rate they enacted in 2017 may be alarmed to hear that so many corporations pay much less than that in reality," said Steve Wamhoff, ITEP's federal policy director and report co-author. "But it does not have to be this way. Congress should take more steps to crack down on this widespread corporate tax avoidance."
The report specifically advocates a global minimum tax that would require multinational companies to pay an effective rate of at least 15%, a proposed change aimed at cracking down on profit-shifting. The Biden administration negotiated a global minimum tax deal with other nations in 2021, but the divided U.S. Congress has yet to advance the proposal.
"Drafters of the Trump tax law made some token efforts to address these problems, for example, by imposing a weak U.S. tax on certain profits that American corporations claim to earn offshore," ITEP's report observes. "This left the corporate income tax in dire need of the Biden administration's efforts to reform it."
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'A Mockery': House Passes Tax Bill That Favors Corporations Over Children
"The bill provides millions of dollars in tax relief for the wealthy and pennies for the poor," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro.
Feb 01, 2024
The U.S. House late Wednesday passed legislation that would modestly expand the child tax credit for low-income families while reviving significant business tax breaks, a trade-off that some progressive lawmakers rejected as far too lopsided in favor of corporations.
The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024 passed the House in an overwhelming 357 to 70 vote, with 169 Republicans and 188 Democrats supporting the measure.
Nearly all of the 23 House Democrats who voted against the bill are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), a roughly 100-member coalition whose chair backed the $78 billion legislation.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said following Wednesday's vote that she opposed the bill because it is "deeply inequitable—at a time when we have seen the greatest rise in inequality with the biggest corporations making super profits at the expense of the consumer."
The American Prospect's David Dayen has estimated that "in the time period when all the tax credits are actually in place, the business tax changes are five times more costly than the CTC changes."
"It is a mockery of who representative government works for," DeLauro argued. "This bill delivers massive tax cuts for the biggest corporations while denying middle class families the economic security they had under the expanded, monthly child tax credit. This is a reversal of the largest middle-class tax cut in history. The bill provides millions of dollars in tax relief for the wealthy and pennies for the poor."
Unlike the 2021 child tax credit expansion that eliminated the program's regressive phase-in and drove the U.S. child poverty rate down to a record low before expiring at the end of that year, the legislation passed by the House on Wednesday would exclude families with less than $2,500 in annual income—the very poorest.
The bill, which now heads to the closely divided U.S. Senate, would also not restore the monthly payments that families received under the 2021 expansion. Eligible families would claim the CTC when filing their annual tax returns.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that the CTC changes in the House-passed bill would benefit around 16 million children in low-income families and lift around 400,000 kids out of poverty in the first year of enactment.
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), a CPC member who voted against the legislation, said that while she welcomes the bill's improvements to the CTC and the low-income housing tax credit, the measure "makes compromises that I cannot accept."
In a scathing statement ahead of Wednesday's vote, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said that "the richest 120,000 households would get a larger share of the tax benefits than the bottom 88 million families" during the bill's first year.
"The poorest 20% of families would receive just $60 on average, while the richest .1% get an average of $57,530 in tax breaks," said Tlaib, pointing to research by the Tax Policy Center. "Meta—a company making tens of billions in profits—would see its effective tax rate drop from 25% to -2% under this bill. Working families in my district should never be paying higher taxes than the richest companies on Earth."
Other Democrats, including CPC chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), similarly criticized the bill's corporate tax giveaways but argued that the benefits for children warranted a yes vote.
"While I find this trade-off troubling and I strongly believe that we need to do everything possible to ensure the wealthy pay their fair share, this vote was for the working families in Seattle and communities across the country who will benefit from an expanded CTC, and I recommit myself to ensuring that we fully fund the CTC to the benefit of as many people as possible when Democrats are back in control of the House," Jayapal said in a statement.
The bill's prospects in the narrowly Democratic Senate are uncertain, and Republicans could wield the chamber's 60-vote filibuster to tank the legislation.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) suggested that GOP senators could oppose the bill to deny President Joe Biden an election-year legislative victory.
"I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good—may allow checks before the election—means that he can be reelected and then we won't extend the 2017 tax cuts," Grassley said, referring to Trump-era tax breaks for the rich.
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Reports Expose Deep Harms of Corporate Tax Cuts and 'Trickle Down' Ideology
"Failing to reimagine a more ambitious and comprehensive use of corporate tax policy prevents us from achieving a more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economy."
Jan 23, 2024
Two new reports published Tuesday by the Roosevelt Institute argue that robust corporate taxation is key to creating a strong economy and improving the well-being of families and children—objectives that have been undermined in the decades since the Reagan era by regressive tax cuts enacted on the false premise that benefits would "trickle down" to the rest of society.
The first report, A Mapping of the Full Potential of U.S. Corporate Taxation to Enhance Child and Family Well-Being, examines what the authors describe as the understudied notion that "increasing corporate taxation will necessarily help children and families by providing additional revenue for essential public services."
That perspective runs counter to what the Roosevelt Institute's second report calls "a 'cut-to-grow' mentality" that rose to prominence in the 1970s and was enthusiastically embraced by the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
"Under this view, the thinking went, it was necessary to reduce the corporate tax rate to grow the economy—and that this growth would allow gains to eventually 'trickle down' from the rich shareholders to the middle class," the report states. "During this time, the corporate tax rate was gradually reduced to 35% before it was dramatically cut to 21% in 2017. These cuts resulted in corporate tax revenues falling to less than 10% of total federal revenues."
"Perhaps more than any other, President Ronald Reagan leveraged mounting backlash to taxation and government spending to dramatically reduce both, regardless of the consequences to American families," the report observes.
"Corporate tax policy since Reagan has been driven by the trickle-down economics narrative that cutting the taxes on 'job creators' will benefit less wealthy U.S. taxpayers."
The decades-long decline in corporate tax rates has severely undermined the federal government's ability to finance critical public goods, from education to childcare.
"Since regressive corporate tax cuts don't significantly increase earnings for working families (through either wage or employment increases), but they do reduce the government's ability to fund family income and care supports, childcare costs—which are already rising—can become a relatively more expensive line item in working parents' household budgets," reads the Roosevelt Institute's first report, authored by Emily DiVito and Niko Lusiani.
"When they can't afford childcare," they added, "parents face the difficult choice of having to cut costs in other places—often on the basic necessities that allow children to thrive, like food, clothing, and enrichment activities—or taking on additional caregiving duties themselves."
At the state and local levels, DiVito and Lusiani noted, "corporations' successful efforts to avoid their full property tax liability devastate public school budgets."
DiVito, deputy director for the corporate power program at the Roosevelt Institute, said Tuesday that "we have a false idea in the U.S. that corporate tax policy is unrelated to equitable social reforms."
"However, strong corporate tax policy is vital to all aspects of a thriving economy," she argued. "And the failing to reimagine a more ambitious and comprehensive use of corporate tax policy prevents us from achieving a more equitable, sustainable, and democratic economy and society for all families."
The new reports come a week after a bipartisan pair of House and Senate negotiators announced a deal to expand the child tax credit (CTC) for three years in exchange for a series of corporate tax cuts. The American Prospect's David Dayen estimated that "in the time period when all the tax credits are actually in place, the business tax changes are five times more costly than the CTC changes."
"Who knows if this deal can pass in time to take effect in the upcoming 2023 tax season, if ever. Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is already asking for changes to make it even more generous to businesses. That's in part a function of the dissembling that there is 'parity' in the deal. The truth is that this is not an equal trade. And it may extend that inequity well into the future."
That warning is in line with the Roosevelt Institute's new research, which argues that a corporate tax code generous to big business fuels inequality by "benefiting capital interests (i.e., business owners, partners, and shareholders) at the expense of workers and their families."
"When corporations enjoy low taxes on their profits, they face a trade-off for how to otherwise disperse them: make investments in the workforce and productive capacity (e.g., raise wages, hire more workers, and/or upgrade buildings, equipment, or technology) or distribute them to shareholders (i.e., pay out dividends and buy back stock to inflate prices). Data shows that executives typically choose the latter."
Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and the lead author of the new report on "cut to grow" ideology, said in a statement that "corporate tax policy since Reagan has been driven by the trickle-down economics narrative that cutting the taxes on 'job creators' will benefit less wealthy U.S. taxpayers."
"Such an idea is often offered in tandem with the notion that this is the only way tax policy can help American families," said Avi-Yonah. "But this just isn't true. In fact, this false 'cut-to-grow' narrative has made it very difficult to argue for a more expansive, progressive vision of corporate tax reform—contributing to a decades-long stalemate in efforts toward real comprehensive corporate tax reform."
"Now is the time," he added, "to reverse this trend with a more historically grounded support of the corporate tax."
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Lawmakers Reach Deal to Expand Child Tax Credit—In Exchange for Corporate Tax Cuts
"Child poverty is a problem. Corporations paying too much in taxes is not," said one analyst.
Jan 16, 2024
A bipartisan pair of congressional negotiators announced a compromise deal Tuesday that would modestly expand the child tax credit for three years—potentially benefiting millions of kids in low-income families—in exchange for reviving Trump-era corporate tax cuts favored by Republican lawmakers.
The $80 billion tax framework unveiled by Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) after months of negotiations is seen as a longshot to pass given Republican control of the lower chamber and likely GOP hesitance to deliver a legislative win for President Joe Biden in an election year.
Republicans
unanimously opposed the American Rescue Plan, Democratic legislation that implemented a historic expansion of the child tax credit (CTC)—briefly pushing the U.S. child poverty rate to a record low. The CTC enhancement lapsed at the end of 2021 thanks to opposition from the GOP and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), causing child poverty to shoot back up in 2022.
While the Wyden-Smith framework would not go nearly as far as the previous CTC expansion, analysts say it would still deliver significant benefits to children in low-income families.
"In the first year, more than 80% of the roughly 19 million children under 17 in families with low incomes who don't now get the full credit would benefit—about 16 million children," the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said Tuesday, estimating that the proposal would lift as many as 400,000 kids out of poverty in year one while alleviating poverty for 3 million more.
"These poverty-reducing effects would increase over time," the think tank added. "When the proposal is fully in effect in 2025, it would lift some half a million or more children above the poverty line and make about 5 million more less poor."
The new proposal would—like the current CTC and unlike the expansion approved in 2021—exclude the very poorest families by design, denying benefits to those with less than $2,500 in annual income. The Wyden-Smith proposal would also not bring back the monthly payments that eligible families received under the 2021 CTC expansion.
The maximum credit of $2,000 per child would be indexed to inflation under the new framework.
Ailen Arreaza, executive director of the advocacy group ParentsTogether Action, said in a statement that while the Wyden-Smith changes would be an improvement over the current CTC, "they do not go far enough."
"The 2021 expansion of the child tax credit was a game-changing policy that essentially cut child poverty in half," said Arreaza. "When Republicans refused to support its extension at the end of 2021, child poverty surged again. We have a proven tool that works almost immediately to ensure kids have enough food to eat and a roof over their heads—it's long past time we use it."
"I'm disgusted by those who saw the obvious need to extend those benefits as an opportunity to extract tax cuts for corporations."
Observers lamented that the only way Wyden and Smith were able to reach a deal with even limited benefits for children in low-income families was to pair them with tax breaks for wealthy corporations.
"Child poverty is a problem. Corporations paying too much in taxes is not," said Steve Wamhoff, federal policy director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. "Unfortunately, many members of Congress have refused to direct resources to help children in poverty unless an equal amount of resources is simultaneously directed towards corporate tax cuts."
According to Wyden's office, the new proposal would allow businesses "of all sizes" to "immediately deduct the cost of their U.S.-based [research and development] investments instead of over five years."
The framework, which still must be converted into legislative text, would also provide "continued flexibility for businesses forced to borrow at higher interest rates to meet their payroll obligations and expand their operations," a summary states.
"As arcane as this sounds," Wamhoff said in response to the provision, "it ultimately will benefit the private equity industry and its practice of acquiring corporations and loading them up with debt, a technique that has led to the collapse of Toys R Us, Payless, and other well-established companies."
Erica Payne, founder and president of the Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement Tuesday that the enhanced CTC is "an undeniable good in this new deal."
"At the same time, I'm disgusted by those who saw the obvious need to extend those benefits as an opportunity to extract tax cuts for corporations, who clearly didn't need them as they pulled in record profits and artificially pumped up inflation. There was no need for horse trading on the CTC," said Payne. "Congratulations to the members of Congress who have worked hard to extend and enhance the CTC; we hope to see it become law. Shame on those who exploit political moments to shower their ultrarich corporate donors with unnecessary tax breaks."
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How Rich Old White Men Are Taking the Lunch Money Away From Broken-Down Schools
Sep 22, 2014
Cuts to Head Start and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have taken food away from schoolchildren. The cuts are directly related to the dramatic dropoff in federal corporate tax revenue.
Tax avoidance is just as bad at the state level, which is a much greater source of K-12 educational funding. Both individuals and corporations are paying less state taxes than ever before. As a result, our public schools, the most important expression of a society working together to secure future generations, are being defunded and dismantled and left to decay.
It may be the ugliest extreme of inequality in our country -- tax avoidance by the rich vs. broken-down schools.
Rich White Male Tax Avoidance
According to a Standard and Poor's analysis, average annual state tax revenue fell from 10% to 5% between 1980 and 2011, even as the share of total income for the top 1% of earners doubled. The top 10% and the top 500 CEOs are predominately white males. Our country's missing tax revenue can be found in their growing stock portfolios.
Corporate Tax Cheats
Walgreens and Burger King are the most recent manifestations of the so-called inversions that allow companies to skip out on the country that made them successful. They don't want to pay for decades of publicly funded research in technology and medicine; a legal system that protects patents and intellectual property; infrastructure, including roads and seaports and airports to ship their products; unprecedented amounts of local and national security, a nationwide energy grid to power factories, emergency management (FEMA) to clean up industrial accidents.
President Obama said, "I don't care if it's legal, it's wrong." These inverting companies, he continued, "don't want to give up all the advantages of operating in the United States. They just don't want to pay for it."
Inversions and other tax haven deceptions are a double insult to us, because not only are taxes left unpaid, but profits have also been manipulated by accounting chicanery to end up in the U.S. anyway.
State School Funding Gone
Overall spending on K-12 public school students fell in 2011 for the first time since the Census Bureau began keeping records over three decades ago. The cuts have continued to the present day.
Three separate studies have shown that corporations pay less than half of their required state taxes, which are a main source of K-12 educational funding and a significant part of pension funding. Most recently, the report "The Disappearing Corporate Tax Base" found that the percentage of corporate profits paid as state income taxes has dropped from 7 percent in 1980 to about 3 percent today.
Broken-Down Schools
In the last year about 75 schools have been closed in Philadelphia and Chicago, almost all of them in black neighborhoods.
Public schools anchor their communities, providing the stability and sense of common purpose that benefits all their members, from students to parents to teachers. As researcher Sarah Hainds explains, "At school closing hearings, people constantly say that it's as if CPS is erasing their history. There are schools where three generations of family members have attended. There's a ton of pride...it's still the center of their community."
With the breakup of public schools, students are often required to walk an extra eight blocks or more across busy streets and through neighborhoods with foreclosed homes, to get to schools that are usually no better in performance than the schools being shut down.
Communities Are Left to Pay, and They Don't Want To
Without state tax revenue, the funding burden falls on local property and sales taxes. Wealthier areas are able to spend much more on their children. They also have better connections to private educational foundations.
Worst of all, some well-to-do communities are refusing to support the common good, transferring their local taxes to tax-deductible parent's foundations to avoid supporting poorer schools within their taxing districts.
The very wealthy -- both corporations and individuals -- have received countless benefits from our long-productive society, especially from our nation's educational system. But they like to believe they made it on their own. They don't want to feel guilty about kids without breakfast and without a neighborhood school.
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