34% of Big, Profitable US Corporations Paid $0 in Federal Taxes in 1st Year of Trump Tax Law
Common Dreams – By Jake Johnson – Jan 18, 2023
“Instead of cutting vital and popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, we need to repeal the Trump tax breaks for the rich and demand that the largest corporations in America finally start paying their fair share of taxes,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
A study released Friday by the Government Accountability Office found that more than a third of large, profitable corporations in the United States paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2018, the year the regressive Trump-GOP tax cuts took effect.
The GAO analysis, commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), showed that “average effective tax rates—the percentage of income paid after tax breaks—among profitable large corporations fell from 16% in 2014 to 9% in 2018.”
According to the GAO, the share of profitable large corporations that owed $0 in federal income taxes after credits rose from around 22% in 2014 to 34% in 2018.
“Each year from 2014-2018, about half of large corporations and a quarter of profitable ones didn’t owe federal taxes,” the GAO noted. “For example, profitable corporations may not owe taxes due to prior years’ losses.”
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which former President Donald Trump signed into law in December 2017, slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and authorized a slew of other giveaways that made it easier for large businesses and wealthy individuals to lower their tax bills.
“While House Republicans want to make huge cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because of their ‘serious concern’ about the deficit, they voted to provide over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to large corporations and the top one percent,” Sanders said in a statement Friday. “The situation has become so absurd that over a third of the largest and most profitable corporations in our country pay nothing in federal income taxes.”
Posted by Teri Perticone
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