NYT: Study Finds Accelerating Decline in Corporate Taxes (last 3 years)

[DeepModem Mom]

Study Finds Accelerating Decline in Corporate Taxes
By LYNNLEY BROWNING

Published: September 23, 2004


America's largest and most profitable companies paid less in corporate income taxes in the last three years, even as they increased profits, according to a study released yesterday.

Companies have always used write-offs, depreciation, deductions and loopholes to lower their taxes, but the study, by Citizens for Tax Justice and its affiliate, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, suggested that tax breaks and subsidies enacted during the Bush administration had accelerated the decline in tax payments.

The study also cited the proliferation of abusive tax shelters and increasingly aggressive corporate lobbying as fueling the decline in tax payments by corporations.

The study was done by nonprofit research and advocacy groups that have been supported in part by labor unions. They contend that the tax system favors wealthy corporations and individuals....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/23/business/23income.html

[Chico Man]

1. The US is no longer a nation of people

Corporations have replaced people as citizens.

You'd better have a corporation if you want to succeed in this country. Otherwise the tax burden will be extreme.

Corporatize or be penalized...

[mac56]

2. Great post, DeepModem Mom! Thanks!

How "the newspaper of record" can report something so self-evident as news is beyond me. I guess it's because they now have a study to verify what we all already knew.

In other breaking news: a study shows that the sun came up in the east this morning.

[stevedeshazer]

3. Breaking news!

Soylent green is PEOPLE! :eyes:

[SharonAnn]

4. The "Dooh Nidor" tax plans of * will bankrupt us all

Dooh Nidor - Robin Hood in reverse. Steal from the poor and give to the rich.

[Blue_Tires]

5. time to dig up my favorite speech from "Network"

Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal -- that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T & T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war and famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

Beale: Why me?

Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.
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and this was in 1976 (year of my birth)...how ahead of his time was THIS writer???

[DeepModem Mom]

6. Magnificent! Thanks, Blue_Tires -- (nt)