For years, Americans have been told that the rich are paying a highly disproportionate share of the nation’s taxes. Claims to that effect often focus on just one tax, the federal personal income tax, which is indeed progressive overall. But when the nation’s tax system is viewed in its entirety, it becomes clear that the reality is very different. Despite their enormous incomes and wealth, the nation’s richest taxpayers are paying a share of overall taxes that slightly exceeds their share of income.
Matthew Gardner
Matt Gardner is a senior fellow at ITEP where he has worked since 1998. He previously served as ITEP’s executive director from 2006 to 2016. Matt’s work focuses on federal, state and local tax systems, with a particular emphasis on the impact of tax policies on low- and moderate-income taxpayers. He uses ITEP’s microsimulation model to produce economic projections and analyses on the effects of current and proposed federal and state tax and budget policies.
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report April 11, 2019 Who Pays Taxes in America in 2019?
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news release April 11, 2019 60 Fortune 500 Companies Avoided All Federal Income Tax in 2018 Under New Tax Law
91 corporations did not pay federal income taxes on their 2018 U.S. income. Read the follow-up report released in December 2019, Corporate Tax Avoidance in the First Year of the Trump… -
report April 11, 2019 Corporate Tax Avoidance Remains Rampant Under New Tax Law
For decades, profitable Fortune 500 companies have been able to manipulate the tax system to avoid paying even a dime in tax on billions of dollars in U.S. profits. This ITEP report provides the first comprehensive look at how the new corporate tax laws that took effect after the passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act affects the scale of corporate tax avoidance.
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blog March 25, 2019 Corporate Profits ?, Corporate Federal Tax Collections ?
Data released Friday by the U.S. Treasury Department should give great pause to all who care about the federal government’s ability to raise revenue in a fair, sustainable way. In the wake of the 2017 corporate tax overhaul, corporate tax collections have fallen at a rate never seen during a period of economic growth.
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blog February 13, 2019 Fear, Not Facts: Netflix Misleads Media Reporting on Corporate Tax Avoidance
In an age when even the most incontrovertible facts are routinely dismissed as “fake news,” reporting on corporate taxes can be a daunting challenge for members of the media. ITEP’s recent analysis of the income tax disclosures made by Netflix in its annual financial report last week provide an excellent reminder of this.
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blog February 13, 2019 Amazon in Its Prime: Doubles Profits, Pays $0 in Federal Income Taxes
Amazon, the ubiquitous purveyor of two-day delivery of just about everything, nearly doubled its profits to $11.2 billion in 2018 from $5.6 billion the previous year and, once again, didn’t pay a single cent of federal income taxes.
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blog February 5, 2019 Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in Taxes
The popular video streaming service Netflix posted its largest-ever U.S. profit in 2018—$845 million—on which it didn’t pay a dime in federal or state income taxes. In fact, the company reported a $22 million federal income tax rebate.
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report February 5, 2019 Progressive Revenue-Raising Options
America has long needed a more equitable tax code that raises enough revenue to invest in building shared prosperity. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), enacted at the end of 2017, moved the federal tax code in the opposite direction, reducing revenue by $1.9 trillion over a decade, opening new loopholes, and providing its most significant benefits to the well-off. The law cut taxes on the wealthy directly by reducing their personal income taxes and estate taxes, and indirectly by reducing corporate taxes.
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blog December 7, 2018 Morgan Stanley Report Confirms Tax Cut Promises Made Are Promises Unkept
Almost a year after lawmakers hastily enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, evidence continues to mount that it is providing far more tax cuts than jobs. A new Morgan… -
blog November 27, 2018 GM Announcement Confirms Tax Cuts Don’t Prevent, May Encourage Layoffs
GM’s most recent quarterly financial report reveals the company has saved more than $150 million so far this year due to last year’s corporate tax cuts. So the layoffs announcement may seem especially jarring to anyone who believed President Trump’s claim that his tax cuts would spur job creation—including the Ohio residents Trump told directly “don’t sell your homes” because lost auto-making jobs “are all coming back.”
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blog May 2, 2018 Apple’s Three-Month Tax Savings under President Trump’s New Tax Law: $1.68 Billion
By now, it should come as no shock that profitable Fortune 500 corporations are reaping huge benefits from the corporate tax cuts enacted last December. But as first quarter earnings reports are released, we’re learning just how big.
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blog April 26, 2018 15 Companies Report Tax Savings of $6.2 Billion in First Three Months of 2018
In reports released over the past week, covering the first three months of 2018, a few of the biggest and most profitable Fortune 500 corporations acknowledge receiving billions in tax cuts in the first quarter of 2018 alone. Fifteen of these companies collectively disclosed reducing their effective tax rates by $6.2 billion compared to the rates they faced in the first quarter of last year.
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report April 12, 2018 Many Large Corporations Reporting Tax Cut-Inspired Employee Bonuses Were Paying Low Tax Rates to Begin With
Since the corporate tax cut took effect at the beginning of 2018, a number of large corporations have announced plans to give bonuses or pay raises to some of their employees. Some of these companies have explicitly said that the new tax law, which sharply reduced the federal corporate income tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, made these moves possible. But an examination of the tax-paying habits of these corporations found that many of them used various tax breaks and accounting maneuvers to reduce their tax rates to below 21 percent year after year before the new tax law passed.
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report April 11, 2018 Fifteen (of Many) Reasons We Need Real Corporate Tax Reform
This ITEP report examines a diverse group of 15 corporations’ federal income tax disclosures for tax year 2017, the last year before the recently enacted tax law took effect, to shed light on the widespread nature of corporate tax avoidance. As a group, these companies paid no federal income tax on $24 billion in profits in 2017, and they paid almost no federal income tax on $120 billion in profits over the past five years. All but one received federal tax rebates in 2017, and almost all paid exceedingly low rates over five years.
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report April 10, 2018 Extensions of the New Tax Law’s Temporary Provisions Would Mainly Benefit the Wealthy
This analysis finds that extending the temporary tax provisions in 2026 would not be aimed at helping the middle-class any more than TCJA as enacted helps the middle-class in 2018.
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April 5, 2018 Washington Times: Andrew Cuomo complains about tax breaks for wealthy — then signs off on N.Y. loopholes
Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said this appears to be another example of wealthy Americans “gaming” the tax system through special… -
blog March 14, 2018 Boeing Paid Tax Rate of 8.4% in Previous Decade, But Trump to Speak About Why It Needed His Corporate Tax Cut
For the second time in seven months, President Trump will visit a Boeing factory to hype corporate tax cuts. He’s chosen the wrong poster child. If there was something preventing the aerospace giant from expanding its business before the Trump-GOP tax law, it certainly wasn’t taxes.
Boeing made headlines in 2016 only because after years of paying zero in federal taxes, it finally paid something. Over 10 years (2008 to 2017), the company paid an effective federal tax rate of 8.4 percent on $54.7 billion of U.S. profits.
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blog March 9, 2018 Pounds, Dollars, It’s Still Comparative Crumbs for Workers
The tobacco company Reynolds American announced this week that its full-time employees will receive a one-time bonus of $1,000 in the wake of a sharp reduction in its British parent company’s tax bill.
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blog February 15, 2018 Mnuchin’s Not So Grand Stand on the Carried Interest Loophole Explained
When President Trump released the initial outline of his tax reform plan in April, carried interest repeal was nowhere to be found. And when Congress hammered out a tax plan in late December, lawmakers agreed to reduce the cost of the carried interest tax provision by about 5 percent. (Full repeal would have raised $20 billion over a decade; the enacted provision raises about $1 billion.)
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blog February 14, 2018 GOP Dilemma: Love the Tax Cut, Hate the Agency that Administers It
The president’s budget proposal would cut the agency’s baseline funding from $12 billion to $11.1 billion this year. This is almost a quarter less, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the $14.4 billion the agency received in fiscal year 2010. Not surprisingly, the long, steady decline of IRS funding during this period has led to a reduction in staffing: the agency’s 2016 employee total of 77,000 was 17,000 lower than at the beginning of the decade.
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blog February 13, 2018 Amazon Inc. Paid Zero in Federal Taxes in 2017, Gets $789 Million Windfall from New Tax Law
The online retail giant has built its business model on tax avoidance, and its latest financial filing makes it clear that Amazon continues to be insulated from the nation’s tax system. In 2017, Amazon reported $5.6 billion of U.S. profits and didn’t pay a dime of federal income taxes on it. The company’s financial statement suggests that various tax credits and tax breaks for executive stock options are responsible for zeroing out the company’s tax this year.
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blog February 9, 2018 The More Things Change: PG&E Records a Tenth Straight Year of No Federal Income Taxes
In the runup to last fall’s tax debate, it was commonly observed that corporate tax reform is both easy and hard: the easy part is cutting the rate, and the hard part is paying for it by closing loopholes. The real test of Congress’ determination to achieve tax reform would be whether they would stand up to corporate lobbyists and shut down loopholes like accelerated depreciation that allow profitable companies to pay little or no income tax. As is now widely known, Congress was not especially determined: lawmakers aggressively cut the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent, but then expanded depreciation tax breaks instead of repealing them. This week the utility giant (and notable tax avoider) PG&E released its annual financial report assessing the short-term impact of the tax bill on its bottom line. The report shows that even after taking a short-term $147 million tax hit in 2017, the company still won’t pay a dime of current federal income taxes, on balance, on $2.1 billion of income overall.
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blog January 31, 2018 How Exxon’s Empty $50 Billion Promise Made Its Way into Trump’s SOTU
Never one to let the truth get in the way of a good story, House Speaker Paul Ryan immediately published a press release with the headline, “ExxonMobil to Invest an Additional $50 Billion in the U.S. Due to Tax Reform.” The statement was completely faithful to ExxonMobil’s statement, except for the words “additional” and “due to tax reform.” Not to be outdone, President Trump implied during his State of the Union address that the company was investing $50 billion in response to the new tax law.
But a closer examination of ExxonMobil’s recent history of domestic spending finds that the “new” $50 billion investment is less than what the company invested over the previous five years.
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blog January 24, 2018 It’s a Small Bonus After All
The Walt Disney Corporation announced this week that in the wake of the new tax bill’s passage, it will spend $125 million on one-time bonuses and $50 million on an education program for some employees, all in 2018. This $175 million spending commitment is notable for two reasons: it’s temporary, and it’s a drop in the bucket for a company that’s likely to see annual tax savings of $1.2 billion a year and has already committed to a $50 billion-plus corporate acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s assets.
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blog January 18, 2018 Apple Gambled on Congressional Spinelessness on Tax Policy— and Won
Now, Apple Inc. would like the American public to know that it has “a deep sense of responsibility to give back to our country” a small fraction of its multi-billion-dollar tax cut haul. However, the company’s splashy press release is devoid of any specifics on the jobs it will create as a result of the tax bill. Like other corporate announcements, the company’s recent proclamation of newfound patriotism should be viewed as a public relations ploy designed to convince a skeptical public that working families will see some trickle-down benefit from this historic corporate giveaway.