In a Remarkable Show of Bi Partisanship... GE Pays No Tax on 14 Billion Profit.

[BridgeTroll]

These are laws passed by majorities of those bodies.  They should not be enticed by "prods".

This is misleading.  Yes the laws themselves are passed by the majority, but these loopholes are more often than not one-line entries in otherwise large bills that frequently have nothing to do with the main thrust of the bill.  I seriously doubt if you did a search of all the legislation from the last fifty years or so that you would find any bills entitled "The General Electric Will Pay No Corporate Tax Act" or what have you.  These things are slipped into bills at the last minute exactly because the sponsors know they would never pass on their own.

Understood.  Who is doing the "slipping"?  And why?  Ge is not "slipping it in".  It is your friendly neighborhood congress.  Go back and re read how Mr Rangel got his legislation through... or more accurately... failed to let a loophole expire.

[Timkin]

Just as aggravating as the company paying no taxes, the CEO accepts a huge pay increase, while expecting his workers to accept a pay cut.  Nothing new there,,, just typical greed.   The $%^-@f-@-%$#@^ should step down.

[Timkin]

Break it down for people like myself who do not understand, Please . 

[FayeforCure]

http://www.propublica.org/article/setting-the-record-straight-on-ges-taxes

This story was co-published [1] with Fortune.

There's a heated debate over General Electric's taxes in places ranging from the front page of the New York Times [2] to the blogosphere [3] to, of all places, "The Daily Show." [4] In the 10 days since the Times touched off this debate, what started out as something resembling a conversation has degenerated into posturing, name-calling, and shrieking. So, did GE really not pay any income taxes on a $5.1 billion U.S. profit last year? Is it really getting a tax refund?
Sidebar

5 Ways GE Plays the Tax Game

by Jeff Gerth, ProPublica, and Allan Sloan, Fortune
Our Partner

Fortune

We're going to try to answer these questions. We'll also show you some things that we've learned about GE that few people outside the company and the insular world of tax techies know. The Times, of course, made GE and its tax gamesmanship a national issue with its agenda-setting piece on March 25. (By the way, they beat us on the story; we'd been working on it for months.) Unfortunately, for all its good work, the Times story has created at least one major misperception -- that GE paid no U.S. income taxes last year and is actually getting a $3.2 billion refund from the Treasury.

The Times' own headline writers got that impression too. "GE Turns the Tax Man Away Empty-Handed," read the headline on early editions, including the Times' Washington edition, the version that politicians and the DC-based news media and commentariat see. "GE's Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether [2]," was the original head on nytimes.com, the version the blogosphere reads.

Those headlines are based on the story's third paragraph, which discusses GE's 2010 financial results. "Its American tax bill? None. In fact, GE claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion." That seems to say that GE is getting a tax refund for 2010 -- but the words "tax benefit" are so ambiguous that it's not clear what they mean, and the article never explains them, or mentions them again.

By the time a revised (and accurate) headline got slapped on the later-edition print issues -- "At GE on Tax Day, Billions of Reasons to Smile" -- the idea that the Times was saying that GE paid no U.S. income taxes and was getting a big refund was firmly implanted.

GE made a muddled situation worse by putting complicated, technical and lawyerly rebuttals on its website, tweeting them, tripping over itself, and then proving unable to explain itself in public exchanges [5] with the likes of Henry Blodget, proprietor of the widely followed BusinessInsider blog. Or in conversations with reporters.

Now, we'll give you brief answers to the main questions, but you'll have to bear with us afterward for the full explanation.



For the first time in a long while, corporate taxes are actually a hot topic -- one that non-business types care about. Corporate tax reform was already in the air; now it's supercharged.

It's been 25 years since the last big tax reform legislation, which cut the corporate rate to 34 percent from 46 percent and eliminated a lot of deductions and tax breaks. But a quarter-century of pushing by businesses -- of which GE has been among the most aggressive -- has left us with both the lower tax rate (now 35 percent) and lots more deductions and shelters and other tax-reducing tactics than the 1986 legislation envisioned. GE's current idea of "reform" as expounded by John Samuels, the head of its tax department, is to cut the rate, but to allow some of GE's major tax-minimizing maneuvers to remain in place. It's hard to imagine anything like that happening now.

Samuels said at a tax forum in February that GE needs a tax system that will let it compete effectively with giant, foreign-based multinationals like Mitsubishi, Siemens, and Phillips. However, their effective tax rates for earnings purposes last year were 40 percent, 31 percent and 26 percent respectively, compared with 7 percent for GE. (GE says its tax rate's been artificially low the past few years, and will soon rise.)

We've already had more than enough heat about corporate taxes. What we need now is some light. And an appreciation that this problem, like GE's tax situation, is more complicated than the shriller voices among us would have you believe.

Wow, those other western capitalist nations (commonly referred to as socialist by the under-informed Republican), are doing something right!!! Despite Siemens and Philips being taxed 31 and 26 prcent respctively, they haven't moved their headquarters from Germany or the Nertherlands respectively.

So much for the shrill........."we've got to eliminate corporate taxes to lure businesses to our state, like Rick Scott wants us to believe!!!!!"

Why do we continuously want to eliminate government revenue? Oh, yeah it was to drown government in a bathtub!

The Republican party is killing Americans. And I don't just mean our soldiers in their useless war in Iraq. I mean regular American civilians, and the killing of Americans, though unintended, is a direct result of Republican policy. Let me say that again. A direct, if unintended, result of Republican domestic policy is the needless death of American citizens.

Grover Norquist, one of the darlings of the extreme rightwing, Gingrich/Bush/McCain branch of the Republican party, once said, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." This statement has been the basis of Republican policy.

http://www.culturekitchen.com/mole333/blog/drowning_america_in_a_bathtub_the_gingrich_doct

[FayeforCure]

Dear Congress,


Please remember: you are fighting over how to spend our money.  We the People pay 33.7% of the Federal Fund while corporations pay 7.2%. Many corporations pay no taxes at all.  Yet your entire focus during this budget battle has been on how much to hurt the people.

We did not cause the recession, the deficit, or the national debt.  We know this, and we need you to know that we are aware of a corrupt system in which corporations spend their vast wealth to lobby and manipulate you.

We know that's why the tax code so unjustly burdens us while favoring them. We know this is why Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are under attack from the US Chamber of Commerce and other powerful lobbyists. We know that is why your policies reward multinational corporations, including those that DID cause the recession, with bailouts, bonuses, and tax benefits.

As you wrangle over how much to hurt our quality of life and jeopardize our future, consider ways to create jobs and invest in our future.


Congress should work together on how to help us, not fight over how to hurt us.


Sincerely,

http://my.coffeepartyusa.com/page/speakout/I_Pay_Taxes

[BridgeTroll]

Wow Faye... what a nice, calm, bipartisan, non finger pointing letter...  and addressed to the proper culprit also.

[Timkin]

I like Faye !   She calls a spade a shovel !!!!

[JeffreyS]

I really think the 10% floor idea no matter what credits or incentives you have earned is a good one.  We still have 25% to work with on those loopholes we need. While getting a monster increase in corporate contributions to the society they reap so much benefit off of.

[Doctor_K]

Sooo... at the end of the day, the headline, thread topic title, and anything else related to this is wrong?  Since GE did indeed pay income taxes for 2010?

[finehoe]

Sooo... at the end of the day, the headline, thread topic title, and anything else related to this is wrong?  Since GE did indeed pay income taxes for 2010?

If you think them paying a smaller percentage than you do is right, then sure.

[Doctor_K]

Sooo... at the end of the day, the headline, thread topic title, and anything else related to this is wrong?  Since GE did indeed pay income taxes for 2010?

If you think them paying a smaller percentage than you do is right, then sure.

Not at all.  i think it's ludicrous.

But the title of the thread and initial article is "GE Pays No Tax..." which is not true.  They did.  It's misleading.

[BridgeTroll]

It is confusing isnt it?  Perhaps that is as it is meant to be...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

But Nobody Pays That
G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
Published: March 24, 2011

General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies..........

 

[BridgeTroll]

In todays news... 

http://www.cnbc.com/id/42570045

GE Rebuffs Tax Refund Report as 'Hoax'
Published: Wednesday, 13 Apr 2011

General Electric called an earlier media report Wednesday that it would repay a $3.2 billion tax refund to the Treasury Department a "hoax."

Members of an activist group calling themselves the "Yes Men" claimed responsibility for the hoax, according to a report from Reuters.

Earlier Wednesday morning, the Associated Press reported that the U.S. conglomerate â€" using "a series of foreign tax havens" â€" would repay the "enormous" refund it received for the 2010 tax year.

Shares of GE [GE  19.958    -0.052  (-0.26%)   ], which is a minority shareholder in NBC Universal, the parent company of CNBC.com, slipped on the AP report. The company has faced intense scrutiny in recent weeks following a New York Times report that it would pay no taxes for the 2010 tax year.

"It's a hoax and GE did not receive a refund," said Deirdre Latour, a GE spokeswoman.

Chief Executive Jeff Immelt in a March speech in Washington acknowledged that the company tries to keep its tax bill as low as it can but said it does so legally.

"Our tax rate will be higher in 2011," Immelt told the Washington Economic Club. "We do it in a compliant way. There are no exceptions."

The "Yes Men" sent the release to draw attention to GE's approach to taxes, according to Andrew Boyd who described himself in a phone interview with Reuters as a member of the group.

"This is unpatriotic, it's undemocratic, it's unfair," Boyd said. "It might be legal but it's immoral."

[ChriswUfGator]

This whole thing is outrageous. They make almost $15bn in profit, pay $0 tax. Meanwhile, everybody is bitching about wanting to raise taxes on the rest of us. Unfuckingbelievable.

[Dog Walker]

"One man, one vote" is now "one dollar, one vote".  No thanks to you, Robert's Court.

"Government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations" - with apologies to Abraham Lincoln.