In the past twenty years, corporate profits have quadrupled while the corporate tax percent has dropped by half.
The payroll tax, paid by workers, has doubled. In effect, corporations have decided to let middle-class workers pay for national investments that have largely benefited businesses over the years.
Corporations use highways and shipping lanes and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, and communications towers and satellites to conduct online business. Yet as corporate profits surge and taxes plummet, our infrastructure is deteriorating.
TheAmerican Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $3.63 trillion is needed over the next seven years to make the necessary repairs.
The Richest Individuals Stopped Paying
The IRS estimated that 17 percent of taxes owed were not paid in 2006, leaving an underpayment of $450 billion. The revenue loss from tax havens approaches $450 billion.
Subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes are estimated at over $1 trillion.
Expenditures overwhelmingly benefit the richesttaxpayers. In keeping with Ayn Rand's assurance that "Money is the barometer of a society's virtue," the super-rich are relentless in their quest to make more money by eliminating taxes.
Instead of calling their income 'income,' they call it "carried interest" or "performance-based earnings" or"deferred pay." And when they cash in their stock options, they might look up last year's lowest price, write that in as a purchase date, cash in the concocted profits, and take advantage of the lower capital gains tax rate.
So Who Has To Pay?
Middle-class families. The $2 trillion in tax losses from underpayments, expenditures, and tax havens costs every middle-class family about $20,000 in community benefits, including health care and education and food and housing.
Schoolkids, too. A study of 265 large companies by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) determined that about $14 billion per year in state income taxes was unpaid over three years. That's approximately equal to the loss of 2012-13 education funding due to budget cuts.
And the lowest-income taxpayers make up the difference, based on new data that shows that the Earned Income Tax Credit is the single biggest compliance problem cited by the IRS. The average sentence for cheating with secret offshore financial accounts, according to theWall Street Journal, is about half as long as in some other types of tax cases.
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