You can't deduct the cost of a
speeding ticket, but corporations often deduct billion-dollar penalties for
major fraud from their IRS bills
Did
you scramble to get your taxes done this year at the last minute? Yeah, me too.
I
really didn’t mind paying what I owe — but I hate having to pay the taxes owed
by the likes of JPMorgan Chase, ExxonMobil, and Amazon. They’re just a few of
the astonishingly profitable corporations adept at minimizing their tax tabs.
That shifts more of the cost of everything from the military to national parks
onto our shoulders.
We
constantly hear CEOs and their congressional hirelings wail about the
“punishing” official tax rate of 35 percent assessed on corporate profits. But
they’re grinning as they’re crying, for they know they actually pay nowhere
near that.
In
fact, the latest assessment by the Government Accountability Office found that U.S.
corporations pay an average tax rate of only 12.6 percent, forcing
workaday taxpayers to cover the multiple billions of dollars that these
privileged elites dodge.
How
do they do that?
But JPMorgan Chase
was fined more than $20 billion last year for major frauds and
consumer rip-offs, and its honchos have now deducted that “punishment” from the
corporate tax bill, claiming it as a cost of doing business. Oh, they also get
to deduct the many millions of dollars they paid lawyers to defend their
blatant wrongdoing.
Well,
sniff the elites, we’re merely making rightful use of the deductions allowed by
tax laws. But it’s their lawyers who wrote those laws to legalize their
thievery. And need I mention that they also get a deduction for the
mega-salaries and expenses of those lawyers?
Yep,
we all pay for their wrongdoings, their fines, and their lawyers.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is
a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the
populist newsletter, The Hightower
Lowdown. OtherWords.org
