Watch: How Corporations Avoid Paying Trillions In Taxes Explained In 3 Minutes
If you’ve paid your taxes this year, this video is sure to upset you. AJ+ breaks down in three minutes how the biggest corporations in the country scheme and cheat to hide their profits, avoid paying taxes, and bully states into giving them tax breaks, costing the government trillions of dollars while the IRS is auditing your family over nickels and dimes.
Turns out most of the country’s biggest corporations don’t pay any taxes at all, and even get refunds. The financial giant Citigroup abuses tax exemptions, credits and hiding up to $43 billion in offshore tax havens, dodging $12 billion in US taxes. The cellphone giant Verizon made $42 billion in profits over the past five years, but somehow received $732 million in tax refunds over that time. Apple likes to profit-shift its earnings overseas, to places with tax-friendly finance laws, like Ireland, which it has used to evade $74 billion in US taxes. Boeing takes advantage of workers and pits states against each other, giving contracts to the states willing to offer up the biggest tax breaks and break the power of unions the hardest.
All of this is gives an understandable framework to what we already know: that Corporate America is not paying their fare share, and if the Republicans have their way, they’ll pay even less while squeezing the difference out of the middle class.
Watch it here:
