John, President Biden is right.

Last night, he spoke about the need to tax the ultra-wealthy and multinational corporations that consistently find loopholes and use accounting tricks to get out of paying what they owe in taxes.

Most Americans pay federal income tax of about 13.6% which goes toward providing for essential societal needs.

So why is it that if you’re a corporation making billions every year, you pay only a small fraction of that?

The corporations’ high-powered lawyers are able to game the complicated tax system they themselves have created through the moneyed influence of high-powered lobbyists who in many cases actually even write the loopholes themselves. So the corporations’ burden of providing for the common good gets squeezed down to practically zero.

This is how we wind up with Tesla, making $3 billion a year, paying a federal income tax rate of just 1.5%. In our current system, billionaire-owned corporations making billions in profits owe almost nothing to the common good.

Nor is Tesla the only giant company that pays miniscule taxes on gargantuan earnings. General Motors makes $6 billion in annual profits and pays only 4%; T-Mobile makes $11 billion and pays a microscopic 0.4%; General Electric makes $7 billion and receives from the government 6% (that is, GE’s negative effective tax rate is -6%).

No wonder people feel the game is rigged.

Tell Congress: We demand structural change. Reward work, not corporate greed. Make the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share.

Over the last 75 years, corporate tax rates have fallen to about one quarter of what they were in 1950, as wealth inequality in the United States has exploded. The result: populist anger, which ironically drives the movement toward giving authoritarian power to someone who claims to be a billionaire himself, and who personally benefits from the system's rigging.

Meanwhile, CEO pay has increased over 1,200% since 1980, while the average worker’s pay has seen a, shall we say, more modest increase of 15%. The resource gap is much worse in populations with historically fewer resources, especially people of color, leading to social instability on a massive scale.

Americans need to know President Biden is the most pro-worker and pro-union president in over 75 years. His progressive proposals would help right this ship: raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, and the tax on stock buybacks from 1% to 4%.

Stock buybacks, where companies buy their own stock back from their own stockholders at artificially boosted values, benefit mainly the wealthiest 1% of Americans, who own over 50% of the nation’s stock. Biden’s approach says, why further enrich the already rich?

Yet General Motors (which pays, as you may recall, only 4% in corporate income tax) claims it can’t afford to pay striking UAW workers more, even as it buys back $11 billion worth of stock from shareholders. The company’s priorities are clear: Shareholders are worth billions, while workers are expendable.

Sign now to demand Congress create a tax system that rewards work and requires greedy corporations to pay their fair share.

Thank you for working to fix our broken system and fighting for structural change.

Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action