Paste Magazine: Meet the 60 Giant Corporations Who Didn’t Pay a Dime in Federal Taxes Under Trump’s Plan

As someone who just came face-to-face with his 2018 tax bill this very morning, and whose hands have stopped shaking just enough to accurately pound the keys on this keyboard, the information I’m about to convey is somewhere between “vexing” and “wildly infuriating,” and is only somewhat mitigated by the fact that the injustice is so very, very expected. So brace yourselves, I guess: The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has found that 60 corporations, all of them Fortune 500 giants, paid absolutely no federal income taxes in 2018.

Now, let’s put this in context: these 60 companies earned roughly $79 billion in pre-tax income, which means that at the 21 percent rate of corporate taxation, that should account for $16.4 billion in tax revenue. There are lot of things the federal government could do with $16.4 billion—it would cover about 40 percent of the cost of making public colleges and universities tuition free under Bernie Sanders’ plan, for instance. And that’s just a handful of companies! On a smaller scale, the ongoing Flint water crisis could have been fixed years ago with $55 million—that’s million. I could go on, but you get the point—there’s a lot of good this money could do in the right federal hands, but instead, it’s staying with the profit-hungry corporations. Read more