72 percent of Corporations pay zero taxes - so middle class has to make up the difference.

Busy, preparing your tax return for the April 15th deadline? Well, not to put a big burden on you but you are going to need to cough up around a little more. Probably something around $66,000,000,000 extra for the middle class to make up for the corporations that pay no taxes. That is the amount of taxes that 25% of US corporations will not pay on the 1,100,000,000,000 they made last year.

A GAO (government accounting office) report shows that 72 percent of corporations paid no Federal taxes. The Chamber of Commerce defends this by stating that many of those corporations did not earn any income. Well, perhaps after using double accounting methods for inventory and playing other clever games with the books some corporations may be able to show zero income on paper. I will simply accept that very contrived argument for now. Fine, some corporations generated no profit.

Ok, then, let us examine how the really profitable corporations fared. Let’s look at companies worth over 250 million dollars and reporting over 50 million in revenues. These companies reported incomes from 50 million to 378,799 million. Even among these mega corporations over 25% paid zero tax.

Those paying zero taxes this year include GE who had $10.4 billion in pre-tax income. Bank of America with over $4.4 billion in income got a handy little tax credit of 1.9 billion. Exxon paid a whopping $15 billion in taxes to foreign governments, but not a penny to the US. Much maligned Wal-Mart on the other hand paid a healthy 34% of its $20.9 pre-tax income for a total tax of over $7.1 billion. They stand out almost alone of the top 25 corporations as having paid a fair share of taxes.

Oh and before you shrug off any of the 72 percent or 25 percent numbers as acceptable, let me point out one thing. Those numbers refer to corporations who paid ZERO taxes as in $0.00 dollars. If a company paid any amount over zero then they were not included. The GAO did not include any level of taxation between Zero and everything else. I suspect because the number would be too shocking for simple minded citizens to handle.

Well, now you may return to your tax return. It’s up to you to fund the government – because no one else is doing it. Remember it’s not what your country can do for you – it’s what it can do for Citicorp.