"jps" wrote in message
...

From Meteor Blades:

Every time you drive up to the pump, you pay more in federal tax for a
single gallon of gasoline (18.4 cents) than ExxonMobil paid in U.S.
income taxes in 2009. That's in spite of the fact that the world's
second largest company had a gross operating profit of nearly $53
billion.

ExxonMobil did pay $15 billion in income taxes. That was 47% of its
pre-tax income. But not a dime of it went to the IRS, however.
Because, as Forbes points out:

Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned
subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands
that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of
Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in
income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has
tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas.

Likewise, GE has $84 billion in overseas income parked indefinitely
outside the U.S.

The fact that many ultra-lucrative U.S.corporations pay no taxes to
federal government is hardly a new event. In April, 2004, the General
Accountability Office found in a study sought by Sen. Byron Dorgan
that "[m]ore than half of US corporations paid no federal income taxes
during the boom years of the late 1990s." And an August 2008 GAO
report sought by Dorgan and Sen. Carl Levin found that "[t]wo out of
every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes
from 1998 through 2005." While many corporations did not pay taxes
because they had net losses for those years, that wasn't the case for
some of the big guys. In 2005, for instance, 25% of large U.S.
corporations paid no taxes on revenue of $1.1 trillion.

Could one reason ExxonMobil paid $0 in taxes have to do with the
$27,430,000 it spent on lobbying Congress against job-killing,
confiscatory socialism? Nah.


Corporate welfare bums!
Locally, the provincial government gave about $100 million no interest loans
and grants to two companies to help them run business locally.
One business was a Korean firm to take over an old railcar manufacturing
plant in the hopes of building windmills for electricity generation and the
other was for a pulp mill.
Yesterday they decided to raise our HST to 15% from 13% (harmonized tax on
goods & services)
Obvious who runs the country..... big business. We'll do anything including
bribery to encourage them to come & then to stay when the original gift
monies run out.