The Tax Evasion Industry

Everybody hates the tax man, so people tend to laugh when tax evaders get away with it. Never mind that Jesus advised people to pay their taxes, and President George Washington personally led an army to go after tax evaders in western Pennsylvania.

Taxation is both Christian and patriotic. So how do flag wavers and bible thumpers get away with their evasions? Plain and simple? They cheat. They leave honest citizens to carry their burden. They sit at the table and order food, they eat and drink, and they leave before the check arrives. They may be good at business, but mostly they're good at avoiding their responsibilities as citizens and neighbors. They are lowlifes. We shouldn't admire them. We shouldn't allow what they do. Mostly we shouldn't be paying their debts for them.

Here's a very good article by Chuck Collins in Sojourners.

Tax evasion is a big business model, and the biggest tax evaders are corporations. Companies like Amazon.com outcompete the small independent bookstores by evading sales taxes. There's an excellent article about this in Mother Jones.

The "Double Irish" maneuver corporations use to avoid paying taxes. Clever them, poor us. Here's a useful diagram.

The U.S. may have a high rate of corporate tax, but corporations don't pay it. The Daily Beast has a list. It's worth sharing with your conservative friends.

The top corporate tax dodgers include GE, Eli Lilly, Google, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp (FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal), Boeing, Pfizer, Oracle, Altria (Philip Morris), IBM, Goodrich, TimeWarner, Morgan Stanley, the Hartford, Devon Engergy, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft.