Bachmann also said there’s a business bubble because the U.S. has the “highest corporate income tax rate in the world.”
It is the tax code she blames for the “business bubble.” She said, “We need to get rid of the blood-sucking tax code. It’s got to go, just scrap the current tax code,” adding that it is “a weapon of mass destruction.”
Only that it's a complete red herring:
BANK OF AMERICA: In 2009, Bank of America didn’t pay a single penny in federal income taxes, exploiting the tax code so as to avoid paying its fair share. The same year, the mega-bank’s top executives received pay “ranging from $6 million to nearly $30 million.”
BOEING: Despite receiving billions of dollars from the federal government every single year in taxpayer subsidies from the U.S. government, Boeing didn’t “pay a dime of U.S. federal corporate income taxes” between 2008 and 2010.
CITIGROUP: Citigroup’s deferred income taxes for the third quarter of 2010 amounted to a grand total of $0.00. At the same time, Citigroup has continued to pay its staff lavishly. “John Havens, the head of Citigroup’s investment bank, is expected to be the bank’s highest paid executive for the second year in a row, with a compensation package worth $9.5 million.”
EXXON-MOBIL: The oil giant uses offshore subsidiaries in the Caribbean to avoid paying taxes in the United States. Although Exxon-Mobil paid $15 billion in taxes in 2009, not a penny of those taxes went to the American Treasury. Meanwhile the total compensation of Exxon-Mobil’s CEO the same year was over $29,000,000
GENERAL ELECTRIC: In 2009, General Electric — the world’s largest corporation — filed more than 7,000 tax returns and still paid nothing to U.S. government. They managed to do this by a tax code that essentially subsidizes companies for losing profits and allows them to set up tax havens overseas.
WELLS FARGO: Despite being the fourth largest bank in the country, Wells Fargo was able to escape paying federal taxes by writing all of its losses off after its acquisition of Wachovia. Yet in 2009 the chief executive of Wells Fargo also saw his compensation “more than double” as he earned “a salary of $5.6 million paid in cash and stock and stock awards of more than $13 million.”
Ironically, get this - I agree with Bachmann to some extent. The US corporate tax code does need to be scrapped/reformed, because it's precisely the cause of this insanity. Except in Bachmann's batshit insanity happy fun time land, she thinks the corporate tax code needs to be abolished because it is too punitive, whereas back in the reality-based world, it needs to be reformed so that it actually compels corporations to pay taxes.
Individuals have been shouldering the brunt of US tax revenue for years, and in the current economic recession, Republicans are calling for corporate tax cuts and 'shared sacrifice' (translation: fucking over the middle class and poor people so businesses and the super rich can maintain their homes in the Hamptons). And American businesses are doing just fine:
The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.
American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms
[...]
Corporate profits have been doing extremely well for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history. As a share of gross domestic product, corporate profits also have been increasing, and they now represent 11.2 percent of total output. That is the highest share since the fourth quarter of 2006, when they accounted for 11.7 percent of output.I know this makes me a Crazy and Unserious Person and a socialist, but it's long overdue that they start paying their fair share.
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