(2011-03-25) Corporate Tax Controversy

GE is the fresh poster-child over many BigCo-s not paying any Corporate Income Tax.

Jon Stewart did a bit on it, including the irony of GE CEO Jeff Immelt getting a big US-competitiveness appointment from Barack Obama. And... Of course, GE still has some workers in America, like NBC Nightly News. And the night this story broke, they were probably all over it like.... (listens to earpiece) Nothing? They didn't... they didn't report at all that GE had... no? (Big Media)

Philip Greenspun thinks that capture/Corruption makes incremental reform unrealistic. Wouldn’t it make more sense to scrap the corporate income tax (which a lot of economists have never liked) and replace it with something less susceptible to lobbying by the largest companies?

Even Google is paying just 2.4% corporate tax — the lowest of the top five US tech companies according to Bloomberg. This begs the question of why do countries, cities and states try to attract tech companies such as Google when they don’t want to support the local community tax base? Twitter, for example is trying to get out of paying San Francisco payroll taxes.