Thanks Jerry: In the Superrich, Clues to Romney’s Tax Returns - Common Sense - NYTimes.com

In the Superrich, Clues to Romney’s Tax Returns - Common Sense - NYTimes.com

LP: Latest edition of taxes are for suckers.

On the face of it, Senator Harry Reid’s explosive but flimsily sourced claim that Mitt Romney paid no income tax seems preposterous. Mr. Romney has denied it, and without his returns no one can say for sure. But for someone who makes millions of dollars a year, would it even be possible?

¶Evidently it is.

¶It so happens that this summer the Internal Revenue Service released data from the 400 individual income tax returns reporting the highest adjusted gross income. This elite ultrarich group earned on average $202 million in 2009, the latest year available. And buried in the data is the startling disclosure that six of the 400 paid no federal income tax.

¶The I.R.S. has never before disclosed that last fact.

¶Not even Mr. Romney, with reported 2010 income of $21.7 million, qualifies for membership in this select group of 400. But the data provides a window into the financial lives and tax rates of the superrich. Since the I.R.S. doesn’t release data for the tiny percentage of Americans at Mr. Romney’s income level, the 400 are the closest proxy.

¶And that data demonstrates that many of the ultrarich can and do reduce their tax liability to very low levels, even zero. Besides the six who paid no federal income tax, the I.R.S. reported that 27 paid from zero to 10 percent of their adjusted gross incomes and another 89 paid between 10 and 15 percent, which is close to the 13.9 percent rate that Mr. Romney disclosed that he paid in 2010. (At the other end of the spectrum, 82 paid 30 to 35 percent. None paid more than 35 percent.) So more than a quarter of the people earning an average of over $200 million in 2009 paid less than 15 percent of their adjusted gross income in taxes.

full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/business/in-the-superrich-clues-to-romneys-tax-returns-common-sense.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share

"16 Corporations or We the People?" (updated)

Scott Walker's biggest donor paid no taxes. Why pay taxes when buying politicians are so much cheaper.

Billionaire Walker donor pays no state corporate income tax

 Diane Hendricks gave $500,000; her Beloit firm pays $0 income tax

Beloit billionaire businesswoman Diane Hendricks has been in the news recently because of her political activism on behalf of Gov. Scott Walker. It was in a conversation with Hendricks that Walker made his now-famous comment about using a “divide and conquer” strategy against labor unions.

During a three-month period in 2012, Hendricks donated $500,000 to Walker’s campaign, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. She is the largest single donor to the governor’s anti-recall campaign, outspending even fellow billionaires Sheldon Adelson (Las Vegas casinos) and Richard DeVos (Amway).

 Hendricks, whom Forbes magazine says is worth $2.8 billion, heads Beloit-based ABC Supply Company, which the magazine calls “the nation’s largest roofing, window and siding wholesale distributor” with annual sales approaching $5 billion.

ABC Supply may be a huge money-maker for Hendricks, but the Wisconsin corporate income tax returns she files claim the company makes not a penny in taxable profit. ABC Supply paid exactly $0.00 in state corporate income tax in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, according to the state Department of Revenue. Tax data for more recent years were not available when the information was requested from the department. http://thepoliticalenvironment.blogspot.com/2012/05/company-owned-by-walkers-biggest-donor.html

Billionaire Facebook founder 'de-friends' United States to keep more of his fortune - Democratic Underground

Billionaire Facebook founder 'de-friends' United States to keep more of his fortune - Democratic Underground:

 "In the argot of social networking, America has been "de-friended". Days shy of Facebook's stratospherically hyped stock market listing, one of the firm's bright young founders has sparked outrage after deciding to renounce his US citizenship.

Eduardo Saverin, a 30-year-old entrepreneur who helped Mark Zuckerberg launch the site from a Harvard dormitory just eight years ago, appears on a list of 1,780 once-proud citizens who last year told Uncle Sam that they would like to give up their passports. The move, which emerged over the weekend, is widely regarded as a tax dodge.
"

'via Blog this'

Excellent piece: "Corporate Socialism" alive and well in America - Fast Forward

How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes

How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes:

'via Blog this'

Reno, Nevada - Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, doesn’t design iPhones here. It doesn’t run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn’t manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby.

Yet, with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states.

Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.

California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.

Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.

It's only a month or two ago that Steve Jobs was up for canonization

Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes, of course. For Apple, the savings are especially alluring because the company’s profits are so high. Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $45.6 billion in its current fiscal year — which would be a record for any American business.

Crowd gathers in Detroit at GE Annual Shareholder Meeting

 Detroit— While several thousand protesters made noise Wednesday in the city's downtown over feelings General Electric isn't paying enough in taxes, three dozen protestors stood up at the beginning of GE's annual shareholder meeting chanting "pay your fair share"

 The group was escorted from the meeting room at the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center by police and security without incident. They continued their demonstration outside in the lobby. A phalanx of security guards formed outside the ballroom to prevent them from re-entering.

 The protesters with ties to the "99 percent" movement — made popular last year in light of corporate bank bailouts — made their frustrations known over GE's tax payments outside the building, stretching into nearby Hart Plaza.

 Inside the Renaissance Center, security was tight. Shareholders were required to pass through metal detectors, and endure bag searches and wand scans in order to enter the lobby outside the meeting room. Only registered shareholders were allowed in, but it was clear by the union pins some wore that they would bring the protest inside.

 A small group of union activists from the Service Employees International Union tried to enter the meeting with proxies from shareholders, but they were turned away by security and police. GE CEO Jeff Immelt had planned to come out and mingle with investors but that was canceled out of security concerns. From The

Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120425/METRO/204250367#ixzz1tBeiekOX

Boston to Corporations and the 1%: Pay Your Taxes!

"ALEC And The Circumventing Of Our Democracy" - M.O.C. #108

Take Me Out To The Tax Game

From Facebook tax dodgers. Another successful season

Tax Dodgers : We go to bat for the 1%"

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I heard they were outside an Ann Romney event. It was good to see they were among friends.

How To MASTER Your Taxes

Pink Slime Economics - NYTimes.com. Krugman announces Republican fraudulant budget

Pink Slime Economics - NYTimes.com

But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.

¶And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

¶And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?

¶None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)

¶So what are we to make of this proposal? Mr. Gleckman calls it a “mystery meat budget,” but he’s being unfair to mystery meat. The truth is that the filler modern food manufacturers add to their products may be disgusting — think pink slime — but it nonetheless has nutritional value. Mr. Ryan’s empty promises don’t. You should think of those promises, instead, as a kind of throwback to the 19th century, when unregulated corporations bulked out their bread with plaster of paris and flavored their beer with sulfuric acid.

¶Come to think of it, that’s precisely the policy era Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are trying to bring back.

¶So the Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.