GE paid just 2.3 percent in federal taxes over last 10 years on more than $81 billion in profits
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By Madison Ruppert Editor of End the Lie Thanks to tax loopholes and deductions, General Electric (GE) was able to pay a mere 2.3 percent in federal taxes on over $81 billion in profits over the last 10 years, according to analysis of the corporation’s tax filings conducted by Citizens for Tax Justice . The Citizens for Tax Justice, a non-partisan watchdog group, said that GE’s latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reveal that they were far under the supposed 35 percent corporate tax rate. GE was able to rob taxpayers blind during years when their profits declined, all while paying taxes at a rate far below what most hardworking American individuals are saddled with. Just last year we learned that GE’s 2010 tax return showed that the massive corporation paid no taxes whatsoever on a whopping $14.2 billion in profits. In fact, GE actually reaped $3.2 billion in refunds and tax credits from the government, even with profits as massive as they were. In response to these shocking numbers – which left many struggling Americans enraged, and rightly so – former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold expressed outrage at the fact that the man who Obama placed in charge of creating jobs was also running a corporation that paid no taxes and thus thoroughly exploited the American people. “Someone like Immelt, who has helped his company evade taxes on its huge profits – and is now looking to workers to take major pay cuts after his compensation was doubled – should not lead the administration’s effort to create jobs,” he wrote in an email obtained by The Washington Post at the time. The Citizens for Tax Justice reported that in 2010 GE paid just an 11.3 percent tax rate on their $14.8 billion in profits. Meanwhile, the corporation itself claimed that their tax rate in the United States was near 25 percent. Even more disturbing, the Citizens for Tax Justice found that GE effectively had a “negative” tax balance from 2006 through 2011. Indeed, they found that GE actually took back $2.7 billion from taxpayers during the period, even though they raked in $39.2 billion in U.S. profits before tax. In a statement to media outlets Bob McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, noted just how foreign this tax rate really is to most working Americans. “I don’t think most Americans would consider 11.3 percent, not to mention GE’s long-term effective rate of 2.3 percent, to be ‘normal,’” McIntyre stated. “But for GE, taxes are something to be avoided rather than paid.” GE attempts to counter the findings of groups like Citizens for Tax Justice by claiming that their numbers are inflated due to foreign earnings being out of the Internal Revenue Service’s reach. Obama has expressed interesting in taxing foreign earnings of American corporations and closing some of the tax loopholes for corporations while also lowering the corporate tax rate to 28 percent. However, Obama’s word is worth absolutely nothing and the current 35 percent tax rate is already close to the lowest in the United States since the start of World War II. Obama’s intimate relationship with GE and individuals like Immelt is also highly questionable, especially given Obama’s reluctance to do anything to compromise the profits of his major supporters on Wall Street and throughout corporate America. The tax situation in the United States is wildly flawed, with average people footing the bill for the largest earners who are taxed at historic lows allowing major corporations to pay more to their executives than the IRS in 2010. Warren Buffet has also come out against the astoundingly low corporate tax rate, writing in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal , “So our corporate tax rate last year, effectively in terms of taxes paid for the United States, was around 12 percent, which is well below those existing in most of the industrialized countries around the world.” Polls have found that much of America supports raising taxes on the highest earning Americans, even amongst a majority of Republicans who were polled. The poll, released by The Washington Post in October of last year, reported that a stunning eight in ten Americans support raising the tax rate on households earning more than $250,000 a year. 81% of Democrats, 67% of Independents and 53% of Republicans expressed support for the move, although I would say that instead of raising taxes, it might be more effective to actually make people pay the taxes they are supposed to be paying already. I do not think that we would be forced to raise taxes on households earning 250,000 per year if corporations actually paid what they owed and we weren’t constantly paying off interest on ludicrous debt. The unfortunate fact is that corporations work together with institutions like the private Federal Reserve to exploit and profit off the American people . Our government allows war profiteers to continue to bleed our nation dry and of course the Federal Reserve and their cronies in government love it since they get all of the interest on the bloated spending. Raising taxes alone will not fix the problem. We need a radical overhaul of the financial system in the United States. We need to put the power of the purse back in the hands of the people and not a private banking cartel. We need to sever the ties between corporate interests and the federal government and stop the preferential treatment that corporations have enjoyed for far too long. Without taking a full spectrum approach, there can be no true change and if nothing else Obama has proven that he has absolutely no interest in change .