Big corporations pay no income tax, unlike you

Telling you that Donald Trump lied, or that the one percent continue to succeed in their incessant class warfare, ranks in the astonishment department with being told the Sun rose in the east this morning. Do we really need more evidence?

Necessary or not, more evidence continues to be delivered. The latest delivery comes courtesy of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which has found that 60 of the largest corporations in the United States paid no income taxes for 2018 despite earning a composite $79 billion in net income. Worse, these companies actually received $4.3 billion in tax rebates.

Had these companies paid taxes at the newly reduced corporate tax rate of 21 percent, these companies would have paid $16.4 billion in taxes. So we have a difference of more than $20 billion — quite a nice return on their lobbying expenses and donations to the Trump campaign.

Heading the list is none other than Amazon. Run by the world’s richest person and recently extracting billions of dollars in subsidies in a sweepstakes in which cities across the United States competed to give away the most money, Amazon racked up $11 billion in profits last year and not only paid no taxes but received a rebate of $129 million. A total of 26 companies, including Chevron, Delta Air Lines, Duke Energy, General Motors, Molson Coors and Prudential Financial, reported net income of more than $1 billion while paying no taxes.

Occupy Seattle rally at Westlake Park (photo by Joe Mabel)

President Trump claimed that his massive tax cuts for corporations would directly result in the average United States household getting an annual increase of $4,000 in wages. That magical figure came from his own Council of Economic Advisers, which further claimed that the $4,000 was a “conservative” estimate. The Council went on to claim that the average U.S. household might see a raise of $9,000.

The web site FactCheck.org, noting that the Council never said how it arrived at these magical figures, used old-fashioned math to reveal the lack of reality here. The site’s analysis of the purported $9,000 raise concluded: “That would amount to a $1.1 trillion annual income gain from simply reducing a corporate tax burden that is currently only $297 billion.”

Still waiting for that extra $4,000 in your paycheck, aren’t you?

Don’t hold your breath

Wages actually fell two percent, adjusted for inflation, from December 2017 to December 2018, reports the Economic Policy Institute. But it would have been fruitless to wait for the promised largesse. The Communications Workers of America made a gallant effort to get commitments for corporations to pass on the tax savings to their workers, to no avail, the Center For Public Integrity reports:

“Corporations balked at saying tax cuts would lead to higher wages because they didn’t want to be bound to a promise to increase pay, a lobbyist for the companies said. When the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers predicted hat a 20 percent corporate rate would hike average annual household income by $4,000, the Communications Workers of America, a 700,000-member union, asked eight major corporations to pledge to hike worker wages by $4,000 if they got the tax cut. The companies didn’t respond. That ‘shows you the difficulty they have, and not only in messaging but also why people don’t like them,’ said one lobbyist who asked to remain anonymous so as to be able to speak freely.”

This sort of class warfare is not new — wages around the world have fallen far below productivity gains over the past three decades, pay inequality has reached gigantic proportions and corporations have showered speculators with so much money that in some recent years the total of money paid to them in dividends and stock buybacks exceeded net income.

The Trump administration, however, has intensified these trends. Worldwide, financiers pocketed an astounding US$1.37 trillion in dividends for 2018, a total that has nearly doubled in less than a decade, and is predicted to be even bigger in 2019. Stock buybacks in the U.S. alone accounted for another $1.1 trillion last year. Putting their chief executive officer colleagues to shame, the top 25 “earners” among hedge-fund managers paid themselves a composite $15.4 billion in 2017, with four of them raking in more than $1 billion each.

In contrast, six percent of the tax cuts given to corporations went to employees in increased wages and in bonuses, while more than half went directly to stock holders.

The costs of poverty

This ever-mounting inequality has real costs. For example, almost 13 million children in the United States (20 percent of the country’s children) live in poverty. The Children’s Defense Fund pulls no punches in assessing the cost of that poverty:

“When we let millions of children grow up poor without basic necessities like food, housing and health care, we deny them equal opportunities to succeed in life and rob our nation of their future contributions. Poverty decreases a child’s chances of graduating from high school and increases her chances of becoming a poor adult. It makes her more likely to suffer illnesses and get caught in the criminal justice system. Beyond its human costs, child poverty has huge economic costs. Our nation loses about $700 billion a year due to lost productivity and increased health and crime costs stemming from child poverty.”

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Trump administration to address any of these problems. Far from the magic fountains of money pouring into your paycheck and reductions to the federal budget deficit, the country’s accumulated debt is rising fast. The Congressional Budget Office estimates an additional $1.9 trillion will be added to the U.S. government’s budget deficit over the next 10 years thanks to a drastic decrease in corporate tax payments. For the first six months of fiscal year 2019 (which began with October 2018), corporate tax payments to the federal government declined $11 billion (a fall of 13 percent) compared to a year earlier, according to the Center For Public Integrity.

Bonuses as a share of compensation (graphic by the Economic Policy Institute)

How will this be paid for? Naturally, in cuts to the safety net. The Trump administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2020 calls for $845 billion in cuts to Medicare, $1.5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and $84 billion in cuts to Social Security disability benefits. President Trump, you’ll recall, promised during his election campaign that he would make no cuts to those programs. Then again, what would we expect from a serial liar whose total of false statements since taking office has surpassed 10,000 — and who has a long history of failing to pay contractors who did work for his casinos and other businesses.

As historically weak as the so-called “recovery” from the 2008 economic collapse has been, all history points to the fact that we are now overdue for the next recession. Nor is the little bit of sugar high the U.S. economy received from the Trump tax cuts (in reality, a bump for the owners of capital but not those who work for a living) going to last.

In a CounterPunch commentary, economist Jack Rasmus explains that the rise in U.S. gross domestic product for the first quarter of 2018 was due to corporations building inventories to get ahead of the Trump tariffs and a temporary decline in imports (thus providing an artificial boost to the import-export ratio) stemming from the administration’s trade wars. Household consumption, the driver of the U.S. economy, is actually decreasing, Professor Rasmus said, which does not bode well for the future.

We are losing one of the most one-sided wars in human history.