America's Corporate Benedict Arnolds

[DanS]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Thanks but all of the numbers in this study are duly cited

If his numbers are so well cited, tell me precisely from where he gets his profit numbers. Do the math in this thread. I will patiently run through your calculations.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
I love it! Loss carryover is horrible 'corporate welfare'! You know when the argument has been lost and the article's methodology ripped to shreds by DanS, Flubber, and MtG, Oerdin has to resort to false name calling.

Once again Imran gets it all wrong. No surprise there. I already made a whole post about how I don't agree or disagree with loss carry over, but, I pointed out how none of the companies in question experienced a lose in the time period in question. Are you a ****** or just deliberately lying?

Please point how the methodology is wrong because so far the only valid point raised is that loss forwarding wasn't taken into account however it has been shown that no loses occured during the period in question. You are going to have to, you know, come up with some evidence to support yourbaseless claims. Just that Imran likes to subsidize corporations isn't good enough.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by DanS


If his numbers are so well cited, tell me precisely from where he gets his profit numbers. Do the math in this thread. I will patiently run through your calculations.

You lazy sack of... ARGH! http://www.faireconomy.org/press/200...tetraitors.pdf

The very bottom under end notes. Get off your ass and support your worthless claims.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Once again Imran gets it all wrong. No surprise there. I already made a whole post about how I don't agree or disagree with loss carry over, but, I pointed out how none of the companies in question experienced a lose in the time period in question. Are you a ****** or just deliberately lying?

Speaking of deliberately lying or being a ******... how does loss carry over = corporate welfare? After all you said DanS and I support corporate welfare. I don't see anything except us supporting loss carry over.

So what are you? A ****** or deliberatly lying?


btw, LOVE those cites!

Only twice does it cite SEC proxy statements, and thos are only for CEO salaries. And he cites BIS statistics and a SEC Form 10-K only once each when talking about economic growth.

All of the other cites, especially ones detailing what taxes corporations paid came from reports by a group called the "Center for Tax Justice" (and editorials from a magazine and a newspaper and one Democrat Senator railing about it). Now that doesn't sound like a biased group. Would it have been too much to include some reports from the IRS perhaps?

[DanS]

Originally posted by Oerdin


You lazy sack of... ARGH! http://www.faireconomy.org/press/200...tetraitors.pdf

The very bottom under end notes. Get off your ass and support your worthless claims.

Nowhere in the end notes is a source for the profits. Show me where he gets his profit numbers.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Oerdin


You lazy sack of... ARGH! http://www.faireconomy.org/press/200...tetraitors.pdf

The very bottom under end notes. Get off your ass and support your worthless claims.

Oerdin

I read your silly Pdf again and saw claims that IBM for instance paid 1.3 % of its income in taxes. Then I went to the IBM website and found these numbers

YEAR Inc. Tax
2002 7.5B 2.1B
2003 10.9B 3.3B
2004 12 B 3.6 B

SOURCE ??? www.ibm.com


Since there is no footnote in your pdf to support the IBM numbers unless it was taken from one of the cited articles, I will defer to the financial published by the company from the income statement. Incase some taxes were DEFERRED, I looked at the satement of cash flows to see cash paid in taxes were 2002 1.7 B , 2003 1.8B-- still a far way away from the claimed 260 million "between 2001 and 2003". You will say there were subsidies and rebates or something but that makes no sense. If you get a subsidy or rebate that should be offset against your cash outflow for taxes.

Rereading your revered PDF, The only source for the info is the Citizens for Tax Justice who I am sure will be discovered to be totally unbiased -- ya right!! I am actually on their website now and found an interesting fact-- There are many corporations that end up paying more tax than the magical 35% rate they cite-- The reason is tax deferrals coming home to roost on companies that are no longer investing. They point out that an active investing company has to pay their taxes from prior deferrals but are able to use current investing to defer current taxes.

Bottom line is that taxation is too complex to garner anything from a silly stupid ratio

[Flubber]

Originally posted by DanS


Nowhere in the end notes is a source for the profits. Show me where he gets his profit numbers.

It comes from those Citizens for Tax Justice. Do a yahoo search and you'll find their site. They claim to be non-partisan and then have a list of articles like

We're paying dearly for Bush's Tac cuts
Bush's 10 trillion Borrowing binge
return of Corporate Tax Freeloaders

My favorites

DO fat cats pay lower tax rates than Workers
Corporate Pork trumps rational Job policy



I hate Bush's economic policies and have sympathy with with some of what was written. These guys are about as impartial as Dick Cheney though.

[MrFun]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


Corporations provide employment and create products and services which create additional economic opportunity for other businesses which in turn buy, sell, trade, fix, etc. those products and services.

So the same people justify government intervention and spending when it comes to the benefit of wealthy corporations, but abhor such spending when it comes to individual citizens who need welfare support?

got it

[Kuciwalker]

This thread has some beautiful pwnage.

[Flubber]

Oederin

I am into their methodology now-- They seem to discount any tax that is deferred and they admit outright that a tax rebate occurs " by carrying back excess tax deductions and/or credits to an earlier year"

See the methodology section of their report

You did look at the detailed report right ??

[General Ludd]

EDIT: whoa. page four?

[JohnT]

The author pointed out that in the 1940's 50% of Federal revenue came from corporate taxes, in the 1970's corporations paid only 20%, and now days they pay only 7%. This is a long term shift of the tax burden off of companies and onto individuals.

Sorry, Oerdin, this isn't reflective of a decrease of the tax burden shared by corporations but rather of the increase in the overall size of government: It's just too damned big for a mere corporate-profits taxes to pay for.

Of course, I think DanS made the same point. I just made it clearer.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by JohnT

The author pointed out that in the 1940's 50% of Federal revenue came from corporate taxes, in the 1970's corporations paid only 20%, and now days they pay only 7%. This is a long term shift of the tax burden off of companies and onto individuals.

Sorry, Oerdin, this isn't reflective of a decrease of the tax burden shared by corporations but rather of the increase in the overall size of government: It's just too damned big for a mere corporate-profits taxes to pay for.

Unless you're saying that it's strictly due to an extreme increase in deficit spending or new sources of tax revenue (which I have no idea of, one way or the other), it is reflective of the tax burden of corporations, in the sense that they are now contributing 43% less to the total revenue than they once did. Now, whether that means that the corporations are actually paying less is uncertain.... I wonder how the ratio of corporate to non-corporate wealth has changed in the same time scale.

[Flubber]

Back on the tax to profit ratio--

The methodology was not as bad as I thought but not great either. According to them

1. They do only count US source income although they indicated that they do move some foreign income into the US category if it was only "foreign on paper". Limited detail on how they do that and why they consider some income to be US when the taxman does not.

2. They seem not to give any heed to present deferrals. If a corp earned a billion and has to pay tax of 50 million now and 250 million more over the next few years, they say thats only 50 million PLUS any deferrals from the last few years. Their method is consistent but misleading. Even the authors admit that corps will "pay" super high ratios when the deferred taxes come due in a year when the corp is not investing much (probably in worse times). This is the reason why the authors numbers and the corps financials do not match. The corp expenses the tax when accrued and lists it as a liability. The authors ignore it until the tax is payable. They seem to like cash accounting when it comes to taxes. The result is a corp might have a few years of supre low ratios and then perhaps a year when they make a loss yet pay tax or pay taxes in excess of 100%of income for that year

Finally, their analysis pays little heed to the policy reasons behind some of the deductions. Yes a corp might get an extra deduction for investing in x or y as an incentive to make that investment. It might be a risky 100 million invested in something the government wanted investment in. The corp might get 20 million in tax savings so their "rate of tax paid" is a little less. Absent the incentive the corp would not have made the investment. So the question for government is whether they would rather have the 20 million extra in tax revenue or not have the 20 million but have had someone invest 100 million in an area they see as desirable.

Many incentives are really that simple. Government forgos some tax revenue to get a bigger investment in some desirable field. Obviously the corp will only do it if there is some business sense to do it but on a lot of investments, an immediate guaranteed rebate of some of the investment amount would be enough to take it into the viable category.

[Ted Striker]

Did any of you even bother to read shawn's post?

Or are you too busy girl fighting over the details of Oerdin's article? Even if the article itself cannot be proven though the minutea, the spirit of what it is conveying is correct.

Secondly, there is incontrovertible proof that tax avoidance activity has been at a fairly high level, if you look at the number of reincorporations outside the US, the number of tax shelters that are so raw that the Bush IRS is going after them, under funded as the audit department is (both parties get buy in), and the level of CEO and Board reimbursement (the money has to come from somewhere - but more on that later). It's like global warming. I was unconvinced until the glaciers started melting. I still don't know all the causes, nor the interactions of the various factors, due to lack of definitive proof. But the glaciers are still f**king melting, and the tax avoidance activity is at a fairly high level anecdotally.

Well done, shawn.

And the second part of his post, mentions the tighter controls of Sarbanes-Oxley, but also points out the "good old boys club" mentality of boards and who really gets the power. It's transformed from beyond networking and more into a cliques, scratch-my-back, I'll scratch yours oligarchy, where the shareholders really wield little if any power at all.