Boy, talk about cherry-picking the article, this DUmmie went out of its way to do so.
From the Reuters article:
Most U.S. and foreign corporations doing business in the United States avoid paying any federal income taxes, despite trillions of dollars worth of sales, a government study released on Tuesday said.
The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.
More than half of foreign companies and about 42 percent of U.S. companies paid no U.S. income taxes for two or more years in that period, the report said.
During that time corporate sales in the United States totaled $2.5 trillion, according to Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, who requested the GAO study.
(snip)
The report did not name any companies.
They're throwing in all corps, inclucing small Sub-S corps like mine, corps who take their income and pay the owners who in turn pay taxes on that income. Of course they're going to show zero profit.
And 57% didn't pay taxes in one year in eight? Cry me a river. How many of those were start ups who didn't show a profit the first year? Or the 42% for two or more years, how many are new that took a few years to get going and/or are Sub-S?
And of course they don't dare tell us which companies, because most of them are small businesses.
Like most people who invest in the stock market, I receive annual reports on all of which I hold stock. The overwhelming majority of them show they paid taxes in their annual reports, so that's a bunch of baloney.
And like PG said, the rules are in place to not pay taxes. Warren Buffett's company, BerkHath, pays zero taxes. He takes the profit made by the company and buys income tax credits, so the gov't gets the use of the money for a short term anyway. The gov't purposely creates "shelters" like that and tax-free bonds in order to attract capital to be used in particular projects and other outlays.
It's libs inability to understand how the tax code is structured that gets them all confused, and it's their own fault for being that stupid.
.