The other day Sen. Barack Obama gave a speech where he railed against tax "loopholes that let corporations avoid paying their taxes while you're paying more."
Let's take a closer look at that accusation. Economist Mark Perry posts at his Carpe Diem blog about Exxon Mobil's astronomical corporate tax bill.
Perry concludes:
"Just one corporation (Exxon Mobil) pays as much in taxes ($27 billion) annually as the entire bottom 50% of individual taxpayers paid in 2004 (most recent year available), which is 65,000,000 people! Further, the tax rate for the bottom 50% was only 3% of adjusted gross income ($27.4 billion / $922 billion) in 2004, and the tax rate for Exxon was 41% in 2006 ($67.4 billion in taxable income, $27.9 billion in taxes)."
On top of all of these federal taxes paid by Exxon Mobil, The FDC recently congratulated the Big Oil company's record profits in 2007. As noted in that post, in 2007 Exxon Mobil paid $35.6 billion in dividends to their shareholders.
If you add the $35.6 billion paid in dividends to shareholders, and add in the $27 billion Exxon Mobil paid in corporate taxes in 2004 (the latest year available), you get a boggling $62.6 billion in gross profits that did not end up in the corporate cash register.
The CW says that Big Oil takes all of these profits away from hard working Americans, and The Man keeps all the money. Obviously, that is not the case.
h/t: Larry Kudlow at The Corner.
No comments:
Post a Comment