I'm the one who posted the 12% rate. I remember reading that a while back but a quick google couldn't find anything. After the googling, I think the 12% figure might refer to how much of the overall Federal tax revenue corporations contributed.
I also found this, which is somewhat informative...
Quote:
This study takes a hard look at the federal income taxes paid or not paid by 280 of
America’s largest and most profitable corporations in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The companies in
our report are all from Fortune’s annual list of America’s 500 largest corporations, and all of
them were profitable in each of the three years analyzed. Over the three years, the 280
companies in our survey reported total pretax U.S. profits of $1.4 trillion.
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The table on this page summarizes what the 280 companies paid (or didn’t pay) in effective U.S.
income tax rates on their pretax U.S. profits.
# The good news is that 71 of our companies, 25 percent of the total, paid effective three-year
tax rates of more than 30 percent. Their average effective tax rate was 32.3 percent.
# The bad news is that an almost equal number of companies, 67, paid effective three-year tax
rates of less than 10 percent. Their average effective tax rate was zero.
# Even worse news is that 30 companies paid less than zero percent over the three years. Their
effective tax rate averaged –6.7 percent.
It’s interesting to note that the average pretax profits for the companies in each effective-tax-rate
group were quite similar. But their average after-tax profits diverged widely.
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Over the 2008-10 period, our 280
companies earned almost $1.4
trillion in pretax profits in the
United States. Had all of those profits
been reported to the IRS and taxed at
the statutory 35 percent corporate tax
rate, then the 280 companies would
have paid $473 billion in income taxes
over the three years. But instead, the
companies as a group paid only about
half that amount. The enormous
amount they did not pay was due to
the hundreds of billions of dollars in
tax subsidies that they enjoyed.
http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers/CorporateTaxDodgersReport.pdf
This seems to indicate that the tax breaks aren't distributed uniformly and that they benefit some corporations but not others. I don't think that's a good thing.
It also indicates a corporate tax rate, for the corporations selected, of about 17-18%.
It also sounds as though Obama is following Reagan's example...
Quote:
By 1986, President Ronald Reagan fully repudiated his earlier policy of showering tax breaks
on corporations. Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 closed tens of billions of dollars in corporate
loopholes, so that by 1988, our survey of large corporations (published in 1989) found that the
overall effective corporate tax rate was up to 26.5 percent, compared to only 14.1 percent in
1981-83.4 That improvement occurred even though the statutory corporate tax rate was cut from
46 percent to 34 percent as part of the 1986 reforms.5
And, a bit of context...
Quote:
But over the past three fiscal years (2009-11), total corporate income tax payments fell to
only 1.16 percent of the GDP, an even lower
share than in fiscal 2002-03 and a new
sustained record low since World War II.
Corporate taxes paid for more than a
quarter of federal outlays in the 1950s and
a fifth in the 1960s. They began to decline
during the Nixon administration, yet even
by the second half of the 1990s, corporate
taxes still covered 11 percent of the cost of
federal programs. But in fiscal 2010,
corporate taxes paid for a mere 6 percent of
the federal government’s expenses.
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“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.†– Richard Feynman
