Corporate Taxes
Very nice NYTimes interactive on corporate taxes
A few random observations:
The numbers are totals from a six year period from 2007 to 2012.
"Effective tax rate" is simply total taxes paid divided by total profit. Some companies that lost money still paid a lot of tax, the extreme example being AIG, whose net six-year profit was negative $83 billion but still paid $8 billion in taxes (a weird case, of course, because the US government owned them for a bit in the middle there). Citigroup had a net loss of $24 billion over the period but paid $20 billion in taxes.
Just recently Apple got reamed for paying less tax than some guys thought they should, but their effective tax rate is roughly comparable to IBM, Google, GE, and Coca Cola, and well above Verizon, Boeing, Amazon, or Ford.
A year or two ago there was a lot of yakking about how we needed to close tax "loopholes" for Big Oil. All the blather never resulted in any change, but Big Oil seems to have been paying a lot of tax already. ConocoPhilips paid $58 billion in taxes on $79 billion profit, Chevron paid $85 billion on $220 billion, and ExxonMobil $146 billion on $395 billion. Unfortunately the chart only includes S&P 500 companies, so Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum do not appear.
A few random observations:
The numbers are totals from a six year period from 2007 to 2012.
"Effective tax rate" is simply total taxes paid divided by total profit. Some companies that lost money still paid a lot of tax, the extreme example being AIG, whose net six-year profit was negative $83 billion but still paid $8 billion in taxes (a weird case, of course, because the US government owned them for a bit in the middle there). Citigroup had a net loss of $24 billion over the period but paid $20 billion in taxes.
Just recently Apple got reamed for paying less tax than some guys thought they should, but their effective tax rate is roughly comparable to IBM, Google, GE, and Coca Cola, and well above Verizon, Boeing, Amazon, or Ford.
A year or two ago there was a lot of yakking about how we needed to close tax "loopholes" for Big Oil. All the blather never resulted in any change, but Big Oil seems to have been paying a lot of tax already. ConocoPhilips paid $58 billion in taxes on $79 billion profit, Chevron paid $85 billion on $220 billion, and ExxonMobil $146 billion on $395 billion. Unfortunately the chart only includes S&P 500 companies, so Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum do not appear.