Exxon's Income Tax: $0

From Mother Jones:

The most hilarious part is ExxonMobil still finds a way to bitch about its lot in life. The corporation's website includes an issues page on "industry taxes," which threatens that energy innovation is already on the ropes because of excessive taxes, and it will be forever consigned to the dustbin by any new taxes on windfall profits (or, we'd assume, plans like President Obama's to close the offshore earnings loopholes that saved ExxonMobil from the IRS this year). "While our worldwide profits have grown, our worldwide income taxes have grown even more. From 2004 to 2008 our earnings grew by 79 percent, but our income taxes grew by 130 percent," ExxonMobil's flacks wrote, presumably while playing the world's smallest—and most expensive—violin.

Not that this should shock anybody. In 2008, the New York Times discovered that one in four of the US's largest corporations regularly pay no income tax to the IRS, and billions are lost.

More here.

With all the corporate news media's hoo-hawing this past week about a recent study showing that forty seven percent of Americans had no income tax liability for last year, without mentioning that these lower income bracket citizens fork over a sizable percentage of their earnings in payroll taxes and sales taxes, it seems like a little context is in order. That is, when I and people who make what I make as a waiter in a corporate chain restaurant, or less, are not paying any income taxes, the feds lose out on, at most, some chump change, even when multiplied by forty seven percent of the population. But when a quarter of America's massive corporations welsh on their tax obligations, the feds are out hundreds of billions.

Which is the bigger problem, losing some spare change to allow people living paycheck to paycheck to relax a bit, or losing serious money because the massive aggregations of wealth known as corporations employ armies of accountants and lobbyists to ensure that they pay nothing? Your answer probably has a lot to do with how wedded you are to reality.

Look, corporations and the super-rich are always going to whine about taxes. To be fair, there is definitely a threshold beyond which higher taxes for the rich will begin to affect the economy in bad ways, but trust me, the extravagantly wealthy Exxon, and other corporations of its ilk, are nowhere near that threshold. That is, we can, if we wanted, tax the fuck out of them, all of them, and they would still be profitable. Right now, however, we're not taxing them at all, but they still whine about how taxes are going to fuck them up. That's what they do: make money at all costs, whether it is legal or illegal, whether people live or die, whether it is right or wrong. Of course they're going to whine about taxes when it is unreasonable to do so.

Personally, I think it's great that nearly half the country got out of paying income taxes this time around. It's for people who actually need the money, as opposed to people who are strangely and sickly obsessed with acquiring more wealth than they can ever possibly spend. And it may very well be good for the economy in terms of old fashioned Keynesian economic stimulus. I've already bought a new computer with my return money, which helps software and hardware manufacturers, suppliers, the store where I bought it, and on and on. Exxon most likely dumps it into offshore accounts, or raises executive bonus checks, helping god-knows-who, but not most Americans.

Bottom line: corporations fucking owe us. Time to pay their fair share.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$