Quote Originally Posted by jp1 View Post
Ok, I've looked at At&T's 10-k's to see what income tax they've paid, going back to 2005. In no year did they even pay 10%, let alone the 35% that always gets touted as the corporate income tax rate. The biggest actual tax rate they paid was in 2008, when they paid just over $7B taxes on just over $124B operating revenue, for a whopping 5.6% tax rate. I would be surprised to find very many large corporations with significantly higher actual tax rates, but feel free to share some examples.
I'm not basing this on one company or any given year.

But as a quick note, we don't tax businesses on revenue. Taxable income is a net income concept. That means you get to deduct expenses.

See page 30 of the AT&T annual report: http://www.att.com/Investor/ATT_Annu...ual_report.pdf

Yes, they had $124 Billion of Operating Revenue in 2008, but they also had $125 Billion of Operating Expenses so they had a net loss for the year.

It looks like for 2011 and 2012 they had tax expense of around 30 - 42 % of net income.

But this is not about any one company in any given year or two.



ETA- But if it was , some amusing stats for those bad guys over in Big Oil

Effective tax rates for

ExxonMobil- 39%
Chevron- 43%
Conoco - 51.5%