Every time you drive up to the pump, you pay more in federal tax for a single gallon of gasoline (18.4 cents) than ExxonMobil paid in U.S. income taxes in 2009. That's in spite of the fact that the world's second largest company had a gross operating profit of nearly $53 billion.
ExxonMobil did pay $15 billion in income taxes. That was 47% of its pre-tax income. But not a dime of it went to the IRS, however. Because, as Forbes points out:
Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas.
Likewise, GE has $84 billion in overseas income parked indefinitely outside the U.S.
The fact that many ultra-lucrative U.S.corporations pay no taxes to federal government is hardly a new event. In April, 2004, the General Accountability Office found in a study sought by Sen. Byron Dorgan that "[m]ore than half of US corporations paid no federal income taxes during the boom years of the late 1990s." And an August 2008 GAO report sought by Dorgan and Sen. Carl Levin found that "[t]wo out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005." While many corporations did not pay taxes because they had net losses for those years, that wasn't the case for some of the big guys. In 2005, for instance, 25% of large U.S. corporations paid no taxes on revenue of $1.1 trillion.
Could one reason ExxonMobil paid $0 in taxes have to do with the $27,430,000 it spent on lobbying Congress against job-killing, confiscatory socialism? Nah.
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