If Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes, Why Should You?

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• Prefatory Note: Taxes in America are a scandal and have been one for a long time. The average “well-off middle class” person (a euphemism for working Americans) pays an exorbitant share of her income, up to and beyond 30% for a modest income under $1000 a week, and faces upon retirement a dwindling Medicare and taxation on her social security and other entitlements she paid in all along. The tax on social security should have been a wake-up call a long time ago but the misinformed and normally politically indifferent Americans let it pass, always putting their hopes in some saviour from the ranks of the cynical money party. Their plight today is the plight of those who take the politics of a nation for granted, regarding politics as something optional that can be safely ignored. This attitude was all too common in America until recent times.  In this ambit, just as about anyone with half a brain knows, corporations and the rich pay ludicrous rates  or no tax at all (see info graphic above), and worse, some of the most profitable megacorps get money from the government.  How’s that to tip us off that we don’t live in a democracy?
• But there’s more than just the rates and what is taxed. We also have to face the litany of other crimes and ripoffs perpetrated by politicians on our hard earned income. First, “earned income” is taxed hard while “unearned income” is taxed lightly or not at all, a longstanding absurdity concocted upon the logic of capitalism to favor again those who have at the expense of those who do not, which is always upside down logic from the perspective of the public good. Accordingly, we see huge amounts of the public money squandered on uber-criminal wars sold by the media and a totally rotten political class, all of which preserve the fortunes of the superrich and their global power, while in the immediate sense enrich the so-called “defense industries,” without which, let’s be frank, the American economy might probably stall out and collapse.
• Seymour Melman called it “military Keynesianism” half a century ago and he was right. Once the glowing period many call “the Eisenhower years” came to an end toward the late-60s, an exceptional period in the history of American capitalism ushered in by exogenous circumstances (the only big industrial nation left standing in the rubble of WW2), US capitalism began reverting to its usual tantrums, seizures and shenanigans. But it gets worse. In the last two decades, with the complete triumph of “finance capitalism” (the finacialization regime), with the political class entirely and unequivocally in the pockets of the Wall Street mafia, the ripoffs have become more naked, institutionalized and in your face. The longstanding pretense of electoral choice has dissolved into almost total non-differentiation between the two wings of the capitalist party.  We live in a plutocracy. Under this utterly cynical regime, the fleecing of ordinary citizens has become a feeding frenzy and perfected art.
• Not only are average American paying absurd, insulting taxes like a significant share of their social security checks, a levy that should be eliminated forthwith and which should have never passed (like Taft-Hartley, but that’s another story, albeit one related to this topic), now the mafia in power continues to plot and implement under various labels (fiscal cliff, deficit scares, “sequestration”, social security privatization, Medicare cuts, whatever) more and more audacious schemes to enrich the 0.001% while taking the rest of the nation to the cleaners.
• Thus, by bipartisan accord, the government shovels trillions of dollars toward the very rich to save them for crises caused by their sheer greed, bloating further their obscene fortunes and social and political power, while forgiving all manner of tax avoidance schemes—from offshoring and hiding income to a bewildering array of loopholes.  One could be justified in thinking that such a state of affairs would please the superrich. Not so. Ungrateful and insatiable by definition, they bay for more. And, in effect, the American people do nothing, really, about any of this. Grotesquely misled by the media and the bought politicians, atomized, they simply sulk as their meager economic stability vanishes. Nobody decent resents paying fair taxes, but when the tax system is violently askew to favor the rich, is squandered in wars and crooked deals, revulsion and anger are perfectly understandable. Incidentally, a lot of fury is directed at tax collectors, but, by and large these are simply working people like the rest of us charged with the thankless task of implementing unjust policies designed by the ruling elites.  
• To close, did I say that Americans, by comparison to EU countries, get jack diddy for their money? Bill Lederer called us (back in 1961), a “nation of sheep”.  The intervening years have made the situation infinitely worse. Now we are being led to the slaughterhouse in broad daylight.  What would he call us today? He had never met Obamabots yet.—PG

AND NOW for OUR FEATURE PRESENTATION…

• If Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes,
  Why Should You?By Robert Scheer, Truthdig

That’s the honest instruction for business success provided by 60 of the largest U.S. corporations that, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis, “parked a total of $166 billion offshore last year” shielding more than 40 percent of their profits from U.S. taxes. They all do it, including Microsoft, GE and pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories. Many, like GE, are so good at it that they have avoided taxes altogether in some recent years.

Think of that perfectly legal and widespread racket when you go to pay your taxes in the next weeks, and consider that you have to make up the gap left by the big boys’ antics. Also, when you contemplate the painful cuts coming because of the sequester that undoubtedly will further destabilize the economy, remember that, as the Wall Street Journal estimated, the tax savings of just 19 of those companies would more than cover the $85 billion in spending reductions triggered by the congressional budget impasse.