Pacific Standard: Inside the Tax Law’s $25 Billion Oil Company Bonanza

More than 50 percent of the tax bill’s benefits will go to the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans, and more than 25 percent to the wealthiest 1 percent, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. As Businessweek put it, “President Donald Trump and Republicans sold their $1.5 trillion tax cut as a boon for workers, but it’s becoming clear just two months after the bill passed that the truly big winners will be corporations and their shareholders.”

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“There’s a gigantic payoff going forward, which is that their tax bills just got reduced by 40 percent,” explains Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at ITEP. “A bunch of companies already paying very low tax rates are now seeing those tax rates drop even further.”

While the nominal tax rate was 35 percent, few companies actually pay this amount. It is more of a starting point from which companies then utilize newly added and pre-existing loopholes, giveaways, and other advantages to reduce the amount of money they actually pay. The result is known as their “effective tax rate.”

“In the case of Exxon, they have never in the past five years paid anything close to a 35 percent U.S. tax rate on income,” Gardner says. “And now their already low tax rate is being slashed by another 40 percent.” Read more

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