Friday, April 02, 2021

55 US Corporate Giants Paid $0 in Federal Taxes in 2020 Thanks to 'Gaping' Loopholes

"If you paid $120 for a pair of Nike Air Force 1 shoes, you paid more to Nike than it paid in federal income taxes over the past 3 years," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.


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Published on Friday, April 02, 2021
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A person holds a sign urging lawmakers to "Tax the Rich" at a protest in New York City on March 29, 2021. (Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

A person holds a sign urging lawmakers to "Tax the Rich" at a protest in New York City

 on March 29, 2021. (Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

For millions of ordinary people in the U.S., 2020 was a painful year in which loved ones and jobs were lost as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and its devastating economic repercussions. But for many of the country's major corporations, last year was a lucrative one—particularly if they were among the 55 companies that paid $0 in federal income taxes on a combined $40.5 billion in profits, as a new study shows.

"We should be asking bigger questions about a tax system so flawed that it asks next to nothing of profitable corporations that derive great benefit from our economy."
—Matthew Gardner, ITEP

Released Friday, the report is based on the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's (ITEP) analysis of 2020 financial reports filed by the country's largest publicly traded corporations. 

Instead of paying a collective $8.5 billion in federal income taxes on last year's profits of $40.5 billion, as mandated by the statutory 21% rate, the 55 companies exploited preexisting loopholes and pandemic-related tax breaks to reduce their tax bills to zero.

Not only did these corporations secure a zero-tax liability, they received a collective $3.5 billion in rebates, bringing the total amount of lost federal revenue to $12 billion. And 26 of them haven't paid a dime for the past three years, a time period in which the GOP's "morally and economically obscene" tax cuts for corporations and wealthy Americans have been in effect.

"We should continue to call on policymakers to address the gaping corporate tax loopholes that make this kind of tax avoidance possible," said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at ITEP and an author of the report.

"But in a pandemic year when so many small businesses shuttered and millions of people lost their economic livelihoods," he added, "we should be asking bigger questions about a tax system so flawed that it asks next to nothing of profitable corporations that derive great benefit from our economy—in good and bad economic times."

In the report, Gardner characterized the latest example of tax dodging by profitable companies as part of "a decades-long trend of corporate tax avoidance by the biggest U.S. corporations [that] appears to be the product of long-standing tax breaks preserved or expanded by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) as well as the CARES Act tax breaks enacted in the spring of 2020."

The report includes a table listing the profits and effective tax rates of all 55 companies.

Some publicly traded corporations that paid $0 in federal income taxes in the most recent fiscal year, such as Zoom, are not included because they are not yet part of the S&P 500 or Fortune 500. But many of the companies—which represent a variety of industries, including technology, utilities, manufacturing, banking, agriculture, and others—are household names.

Some of the most well-known brands, according to ITEP's analysis, include the following:

  • Food conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland enjoyed $438 million of U.S. pretax income last year and received a federal tax rebate of $164 million.
  • The cable TV provider Dish Network paid no federal income taxes on $2.5 billion of U.S. income in 2020.
  • The delivery giant FedEx zeroed out its federal income tax on $1.2 billion of U.S. pretax income last year and received a rebate of $230 million.
  • The shoe manufacturer Nike didn't pay a dime of federal income tax on almost $2.9 billion of U.S. pretax income in 2020, instead enjoying a $109 million tax rebate.
  • The software company Salesforce avoided all federal income taxes last year on $2.6 billion of U.S. income.

As Gardner wrote, "the biggest and most profitable U.S. corporations have found ways to shelter their profits from federal income taxation" for decades, which ITEP has documented "since the early years of the Reagan administration's misguided tax-cutting experiment."

"A widely cited ITEP analysis of an eight-year period (2008 through 2015) confirmed that federal tax avoidance remained rampant before the TCJA," but now that "most corporations [are] reporting their third year of results under the new corporate tax laws pushed through by President Donald Trump in 2017, it is crystal clear that the TCJA failed to address loopholes that enable tax dodging—and may have made it worse," he added.

According to ITEP, "the companies used a combination of old and new tax breaks to secure a zero-tax obligation." Gardner documented the "familiar" tactics that corporations used to slash their effective federal tax rate on corporate profits:

  • More than a dozen used a tax break for executive stock options to sharply reduce their income taxes last year;
  • At least half a dozen companies used the federal research and experimentation credit to reduce their income taxes in 2020;
  • Tax breaks for renewable energy are part of the tax avoidance scheme for several utility companies; and
  • A provision in the TCJA allowing companies to immediately write off capital investments—the most extreme version of accelerated depreciation—helped more than a dozen companies reduce their income tax substantially. 

In addition, Gardner noted, there is "a new factor driving down corporate tax bills: the CARES Act, ostensibly designed to help people and businesses to stay afloat during the pandemic."

While "tax law previously allowed companies to carry back losses to offset profits in two prior years," Gardner wrote that "the TCJA bars companies from doing this (although it still allows companies to carry losses forward to offset profits in future years). However, the CARES Act temporarily restored companies' ability to carry back losses and, incredibly, is more generous than the pre-TCJA rules."

ITEP noted that "the provision's generosity (the act retroactively loosens rules even for losses in years before the pandemic) provides a ripe breeding ground for corporate tax accounting gimmicks." As Gardner pointed out, "some companies used a CARES Act provision to 'carry back' 2018 or 2019 losses to offset profits they reported in prior years, resulting in a rebate that reduced their 2020 taxes, in some cases to less than nothing."

Notably, the publication of ITEP's report coincided with the Biden administration's push to raise the corporate tax rate to 28% to fund the American Jobs Plan, as its physical and social infrastructure package is called.

"Fortunately," Gardner wrote, "the policy remedies Congress shunned in 2017 remain available today. By paring the tax breaks identified in this report, or by re-introducing some form of a 'minimum tax' requiring profitable companies to pay at least some tax in any profitable year, Congress and President Biden could take a major step toward a fairer and more sustainable tax system."

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Tax the Rich. Here's How

These 7 ways of taxing the rich would generate more than $6 trillion over 10 years.


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 Published on Friday, April 02, 2021 
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RobertReich.org
People participate in a "March on Billionaires" event on July 17, 2020 in New York City. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

People participate in a "March on Billionaires" event on July 17, 2020 in New York City.

 (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Income and wealth are now more concentrated at the top than at any time over the last 80 years, and our unjust tax system is a big reason why. The tax code is rigged for the rich, enabling a handful of wealthy individuals to exert undue influence over our economy and democracy. 

Conservatives fret about budget deficits. Well, then, to pay for what the nation needs—ending poverty, universal health care, infrastructure, reversing climate change, investing in communities, and so much more—the super-wealthy have to pay their fair share.

Here are seven necessary ways to tax the rich.

First: Repeal the Trump tax cuts.

It’s no secret Trump’s giant tax cut was a giant giveaway to the rich. 65 percent of its benefits go to the richest fifth, 83 percent to the richest 1 percent over a decade. In 2018, for the first time on record, the 400 richest Americans paid a lower effective tax rate than the bottom half. Repealing the Trump tax cut’s benefits to the wealthy and big corporations, as Joe Biden has proposed, will raise an estimated $500 billion over a decade.

Second: Raise the tax rate on those at the top. 

In the 1950s, the highest tax rate on the richest Americans was over 90 percent. Even after tax deductions and credits, they still paid over 40 percent. But since then, tax rates have dropped dramatically. Today, after Trump’s tax cut, the richest Americans pay less than 26 percent, including deductions and credits. And this rate applies only to dollars earned in excess of $523,601. Raising the marginal tax rate by just one percent on the richest Americans would bring in an estimated $123 billion over 10 years. 

Third: A wealth tax on the super-wealthy.

Wealth is even more unequal than income. The richest 0.1% of Americans have almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. Just during the pandemic, America’s billionaires added $1.3 trillion to their collective wealth. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax would charge 2 percent on wealth over $50 million and 3 percent on wealth over $1 billion. It would only apply to about 75,000 U.S. households, fewer than 0.1% of taxpayers. Under it, Jeff Bezos would owe $5.7 billion out of his $185 billion fortune—less than half what he made in one day last year. The wealth tax would raise $2.75 trillion over a decade, enough to pay for universal childcare and free public college with plenty left over.

Fourth: A transactions tax on trades of stock.

The richest 1 percent owns 50 percent of the stock market. A tiny 0.1 percent tax on financial transactions—just $1 per $1,000 traded—would raise $777 billion over a decade. That’s enough to provide housing vouchers to all homeless people in America more than 12 times over.

Fifth: End the “stepped-up cost basis” loophole.

The heirs of the super-rich pay zero capital gains taxes on huge increases in the value of what they inherit because of a loophole called the stepped-up basis. At the time of death, the value of assets is “stepped up” to their current market value—so a stock that was originally valued at, say, one dollar when purchased but that’s worth $1,000 when heirs receive it, escapes $999 of capital gains taxes. This loophole enables huge and growing concentrations of wealth to be passed from generation to generation without ever being taxed. Eliminating this loophole would raise $105 billion over a decade.

Six: Close other loopholes for the super-rich.

For example, one way the managers of real estate, venture capital, private equity and hedge funds reduce their taxes is the carried interest loophole, which allows them to treat their income as capital gains rather than ordinary wage income. That means they get taxed at the lower capital gains rate rather than the higher tax rate on incomes. Closing this loophole is estimated to raise $14 billion over a decade.

Seven: Increase the IRS’s funding so it can audit rich taxpayers.

Because the IRS has been so underfunded, millionaires are far less likely to be audited than they used to be. As a result, the IRS fails to collect a huge amount of taxes from wealthy taxpayers. Collecting all unpaid federal income taxes from the richest 1 percent would generate at least $1.75 trillion over the decade. So fully fund the IRS.

Together, these 7 ways of taxing the rich would generate more than $6 trillion over 10 years—enough to tackle the great needs of the nation. As inequality has exploded, our unjust tax system has allowed the richest Americans to cheat their way out of paying their fair share. 

It’s not radical to rein in this irresponsibility. It’s radical to let it continue.

Watch:

Robert Reich

Robert Reich, is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. His book include:  "Aftershock" (2011), "The Work of Nations" (1992), "Beyond Outrage" (2012) and, "Saving Capitalism" (2016). He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, former chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." Reich's newest book is "The Common Good" (2019). He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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America's Military-Industrial Complex Squanders $1.7 Trillion on a Lame Fighter Jet While the President Begs for Infrastructure Cash

Isn’t there a better way?


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published on
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The Philadelphia Inquirer
 U.S. Air Force Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning stealth fighter flies over the San Francisco Bay in San Francisco, California on October 13, 2019. (Photo: Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

U.S. Air Force Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning stealth fighter flies over the

 San Francisco Bay in San Francisco, California on October 13, 2019.

 (Photo: Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

A Ferrari is surely a wonderful sports car, but let's be honest: Most of us couldn't afford the day-to-day maintenance, let alone the sticker price, and these beautiful creatures are hard to drive on America's pothole-plagued streets, and a massive pain in the butt to repair when they break down. So you can imagine the raised eyebrows earlier this year when a top U.S. Air Force general compared the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jet—decades and hundreds of billions of dollars into a lifetime that will cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion—to that Italian dream machine.

"I want to moderate how much we're using those aircraft," Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the Air Force chief of staff, told Pentagon reporters about the Lockheed Martin-built fighter in February. "You don't drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays. This is our high end, we want to make sure we don't use it all for the low-end fight … We don't want to burn up capability now and wish we had it later."

Experts have found that massive military spending—although it does create jobs at defense plants, so often located in the districts of key House members—is actually a drain on a nation's economy, because it diverts dollars from much more productive uses such as education...or infrastructure.

In so many words, Brown was admitting that one of the most expensive weapons systems known to humankind is a failure—to be kept under a heavy tarp in a padlocked garage six days a week. His words riled critics like William Astore, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who today writes frequently about Pentagon waste. That's because the F-35 was sold to the public in the early 1990s not as a luxury item but as a lower-cost, everyday workhorse fighter jet. He said the flaws now deeply embedded in America's military-industrial complex—the Pentagon's demands for the newest gadgets and a defense contractor's skill at upping the ante—"is how you end up with a Ferrari instead of a Camry ... or even an Audi."

The massive swing-and-a-miss that is the F-35—which already has the Pentagon dreaming of a new, new next-gen fighter that might actually be cheaper and easier to use—is just one symptom of a much greater problem: In spending more on war-related costs than the world's next 10 nations combined, the U.S. wastes billions on weapon systems that are ineffective and often not even needed. This dollar drain hasn't let up even as America's highways fill up with those Ferrari-foiling potholes and bridges collapse, while the world's richest nation falls behind on everything from high-speed rail to solar energy to teaching our kids.

But the obscene failures of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower tried to warn us about way back in 1961 seem particularly frustrating this spring, as President Biden begs Congress to help him pay for the $2 trillion infrastructure plan he unveiled Wednesday in Pittsburgh. His scheme aims to not only address those decades of shameful neglect of highways but also stop poisoning kids with lead in drinking water, as happened in Flint, and tackle 21st century problems like climate change—but the fight will be over how to pay for it.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with Biden's idea, which is to raise corporate taxes back to 2017 levels, before Donald Trump's irresponsible tax cut that—studies have shown—may have helped slightly fatten the bottom line for Big Business but did little for the everyday worker. But the Chamber of Commerce crowd and their GOP handmaidens on Capitol Hill will fight this with every fiber of their being, and even with Democrats using the 51-vote reconciliation tool there is no guarantee the badly needed plan will pass.

Meanwhile, the money blown on that sleek fighter jet behind the padlock on America's garage could have—OK, with help from a good accountant, perhaps—painlessly paid for 85% of what the Biden administration is seeking to do here. Or, what if we went crazy and tackled senseless Pentagon waste and raised taxes on corporations AND on billionaires like Jeff Bezos and used the savings for our other massive needs, like making community college and public universities free to attend? But here's the deal, folks—Uncle Joe isn't going there, not yet.

The new administration has already signaled to Capitol Hill that its next Defense Department spending plan slated for later this spring will be essentially "flat"—if that word can be used to describe a bloated Pentagon budget of about $704 to $708 billion. The Biden plan would ignore a letter from 50 House progressives pleading for real cuts to instead invest "in diplomacy, humanitarian aid, global public health, sustainability initiatives, and basic research." But of course there's also pressure from congressional conservatives who want to spend even more on weapons, to accelerate a new cold war with Russia but especially with China.

The latter idea is not only the morally wrong choice, but ignores how much money we throw away on the barely usable weapons we have now. The F-35 Lightning II—with its premature cracks in its initial testing, inevitable and frequent software glitches, "sluggish" performance in test battles against the older model F-16, and with demands from Pentagon bosses that made it under-perform earlier-generation jets but also more costly to maintain—is obviously Exhibit A. Some of the fighter jet's defects are comically ironic—including the fact that a plane that was named Lightning II has problems in flying through lightning.





But critics such as Astore point to other Defense Department boondoggles that could be killed or scaled back. His list includes the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers ($14 billion a pop) which the retired colonel joked is more like Chevy Chase's Saturday Night Live impersonation of a stumbling Ford, with elevators that don't work and airplane catapults that don't catapult, or the Boeing K-46 tanker which—again, ironically—leaks fuel, or the Navy's Littoral Combat Ships that one defense journalist called "floating garbage piles" (at a price of $5 billion for every 10). There's more, but you probably get the drift by now.

A practical, real world solution here isn't rocket science, or even aircraft-carrier elevator science. The Biden administration could find hundreds of billions of dollars to deal with America's more pressing needs at home, as critics like Astore have noted, with simple moves like a) ending its sudden skittishness on carrying out the president's 2020 campaign promise to end the war in Afghanistan as soon as humanly possible and b) trimming the Pentagon's annual budget back down to the roughly $600 billion level it was at before its massive boost under President Trump, who was so eager to please the generals, no questions asked. On the F-35, it's too late to kill the project (for one thing, we've already sold it to our so-called allies like the United Arab Emirates) but we could save hundreds of billions by building fewer.

Experts have found that massive military spending—although it does create jobs at defense plants, so often located in the districts of key House members—is actually a drain on a nation's economy, because it diverts dollars from much more productive uses such as education...or infrastructure. So cutting the Pentagon budget to pay for part of the Biden agenda seems like a no-brainer. But Democrats just can't quit their reflexive instincts from the Ronald Reagan era (Biden's heyday in the Senate) that the slightest hint of looking weak on defense will cause them to lose elections—even after the real Cold War ended in 1991.

Real courage and strength would be admitting that America can easily retain the world's strongest military while still reclaiming hundreds of billions of wasted dollars that could instead improve our schools—and maybe even better educate our kids to make smarter decisions about war and peace than my generation has. And how wonderful would it be to pay for the things that our middle class actually needs with a massive garage sale? We can start with the Ferrari.











© 2021 The Philadelphia Inquirer

Will Bunch

Will Bunch is a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of its popular blog Attytood.

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Disastrous US Drug War Is Key Driver of Displacement in Central America

Why are desperate refugees turning up on the U.S. border? Because we have offloaded the costs of the drug war on Latin America.

by
 Published on Friday, April 02, 2021
by
Foreign Policy In Focus
Migrants flock to our borders seeking relief from the terror caused by ruthless narcotraffickers and governments corrupted by the drug trade. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Migrants flock to our borders seeking relief from the terror caused by ruthless narcotraffickers and governments corrupted by the drug trade. (Photo: Shutterstock)

We are torn by images of unaccompanied minors and overcrowded facilities at our southern border, but few in the United States are asking why so many Central American families are so desperate to escape their own countries that they are willing to risk everything—including family separation.

These migrants are not fleeing some Act of God—drought or hurricanes or the like—that could not be anticipated or prevented. Rather, they are fleeing cartel violence and governmental corruption.

As CNN recently noted, “poverty, crime, and corruption in Latin America have long been drivers of migration.” Indeed, many Central Americans have concluded that the risks of the journey, of the smugglers, and of the possibility of losing their children are outweighed by the near certainty of violence or death at home.

But what explains the cartels, the violence and the governmental corruption? Fundamentally, it all stems from the U.S. War on Drugs.

When something that people want is declared illegal, the inevitable and predictable consequence is violence. Our experiment with alcohol prohibition in the United States (1920-1933) led to violence and corruption in U.S. cities as the unabated demand for alcohol led traffickers to pay bribes to police and politicians. Criminal gangs (think Al Capone) slaughtered each other as well as bystanders while battling over control of the alcohol trade.

We have created the problems driving desperate people to our borders and we have the power to change the dynamic.

However, during Prohibition, we did not try to force the rest of the world to join in our crusade. All the costs in violence and corruption stayed home to roost, which is probably why it took us only 13 years to realize that the downsides of this experiment outweighed whatever benefits there might be. With repeal, violence and corruption in American cities declined dramatically.

President Nixon ignored these lessons of Prohibition when he doubled down on illegality for other drugs. U.S. demand did not decrease, and Latin American supply met the demand. We wrongly believed that supply-side interdiction would result in fewer drug imports, but it has only resulted in smarter and more violent traffickers.

Drug-related governmental violence and corruption within the U.S. is minimal. We have offloaded most of the costs of the drug war onto the producer and transit countries, especially Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. We have used foreign aid and military assistance as leverage to force them to man the front lines of our War on Drugs regardless of the resulting corruption of their own politicians, police, and military. (By contrast, Uruguay, which does not rely on U.S. foreign aid, could implement its own, more liberal drug policies.)

If decapitated bodies were found outside Washington, D.C. instead of Mexico City, we would have changed course a long time ago, but until migrants massed at our border, we didn’t really notice the collateral damage elsewhere. We complain about corruption and “failures of governance” in these countries, yet our policies have systematically undercut democracy and made dysfunction inevitable. Latin American governments can’t be accountable to their own citizens when they must respond to the financial threats and incentives from the United States.

Not surprisingly, migrants flock to our borders seeking relief from the terror caused by ruthless narcotraffickers and governments corrupted by the drug trade. Our “immigration crisis” is a problem of our own making.

So how to change the situation?

The Biden administration has recognized that there must be reasons behind migration, and has named Vice President Kamala Harris at the point person for deterring migration and looking for “root causes” of the influx. However, a focus limited to diplomatic efforts (strengthening local border police) and economic aid is likely to be less than successful. As the Brookings Institution has noted, foreign aid tends to vanish into the hands of corrupt government officials. More money allocated to these same corrupt government officials and police departments is unlikely to change migration pressures.

This focus on “fixing” the Central American countries is also treating the migration problem as somehow caused by them: If only they would be less corrupt and would grow their economies, the migrants would stay home. We are blaming the victim. This completely ignores our essential role in destabilizing governments and fostering cartel violence.

We have created the problems driving desperate people to our borders and we have the power to change the dynamic. We can end the drug war in the U.S. and instead safely regulate and control all illicit substances, as we have done with alcohol and tobacco and, more recently, cannabis. We can cease foisting a drug war upon vulnerable South and Central American countries. With drugs no longer illegal, cartels lose both market share and a reason to bribe government officials.

Obviously, ending the War on Drugs and its disastrous collateral consequences is not a quick fix for the border. However, border problems—which clearly require some short-term logistical fixes—are only a symptom of our failed drug policies and should not distract attention from our practical and moral obligation to fix the real root causes of migration.

It will take time for these countries to re-stabilize. Economic development, job creation, and poverty reduction require the rule of law—honest governmental regulation, enforceable property rights, honest and expeditious courts, and police who assist rather than prey upon the public.

With the War on Drugs a thing of the past, and rule of law reestablished, the dynamism and talent of the population can turn to creating, rather than survival or escape. This will be a tremendous gain for our entire hemisphere.

The asylum problem will take care of itself when countries south of our border, responsive to their own citizens, are again free to craft their own destinies, and staying home becomes a natural and attractive option for parents and their children.

Foreign Policy In Focus contributor Inge Fryklund was a Chicago prosecutor during the 1980s. From 2004 to 2012, she spent more than four years in Afghanistan, working with the legal system and with national, provincial, and municipal governments. She is recently returned from Helmand Province, the heart of opium poppy production

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