Tag: Tax evasion

CORPORATE AMERICA IS WRECKING CAPITALISM

SUMMARY: The Trump regime has cut a corrupt deal with corporate America, which most of the corporate elites have readily gone along with despite its corruption and undermining of democracy. This is what oligarchy and fascism are all about. Everyday citizens pay financially and with their freedom as these corrupt government and business people get richer and richer, as well as more and more powerful. Recently, Gerard Baker, editor-at-large (and former editor-in-chief) of The Wall Street Journal wrote two columns that make a powerful statement about the damage America’s corporate elites and their style of capitalism have done.

(Note: If you find a post too long to read, please just skim the bolded portions. Thanks for reading my blog!)

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The Trump regime has cut a corrupt deal with corporate America, which the corporate elites have all too readily been happy to accept. It is based on greed and corruption by both these parties: the government will let the corporations and their executives do whatever they want to grow their profits and wealth as long as they pay homage to Trump and his regime verbally and financially. That everyday Americans will suffer from unaffordable costs of daily living and from poor pay and working conditions does not concern either of these parties.

What’s surprising is that so few members of the corporate elite have been willing to call out the corruption and the undermining of democracy. A group calling themselves Patriotic Millionaires has been highlighting the harm of the high and growing levels of economic inequality for some time. They have been promoting policy solutions through changes in tax and employee pay laws. Patriotic Millionaires has proposed “The Money Agenda,” a set of policies that would reduce economic inequality and “permanently stabilize the economic lives of working people, stimulate wide-spread economic growth, and ensure prosperity and stability.” (See this previous post for more details.)

Recently, Gerard Baker, editor-at-large (and former editor-in-chief) of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) wrote two columns that make a powerful statement about what America’s corporate elites and their current style of capitalism have done wrong. I don’t imagine that I have to tell you that the WSJ and Baker previously have been stanch proponents and, when necessary, defenders of American capitalism. Baker’s recent columns in the WSJ (paywall) are titled How to Cure What Ails American Capitalism (8/17/26) and Socialism Is the Wrong Answer, but the Questions Are Real (8/10/26). Robert Reich provides a nice summary of Baker’s points in this blog post.

Baker writes that, “The widespread popular dissatisfaction with the working of modern American capitalism may be the product of some real, objective problems in the way American capitalism is working.” The problems he notes include the high level of economic inequality, the unaffordability of daily life for many, and the corruption and lack of accountability of the political and corporate elites. He points out that this is harming social solidarity and leading to demands for a radical replacement of American capitalism.

Baker further writes that, “Most of the causes of America’s economic dysfunction are the result of a capitalism that has mutated into a system run by and for large corporate interests.” The dysfunction he highlights includes oligopoly-level concentration in almost every business sector; regulation, legislation, and policy that benefit big companies; and a privatized healthcare system that operates to generate profits for providers, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies while producing poor outcomes for patients and very high costs. He states that the overall result is a concentration of “market, economic and political power by a business-political class that promotes its own well-being at the expense of competition, the market and ultimately the people.”

The fact that this is coming from a career-long proponent and advocate for American capitalism is striking and underscores how poorly capitalism is working. It also highlights how shocking it is that other supposed leaders in corporate America aren’t standing up both to call this out and to support remedies – not to mention speaking out against the corruption and undermining of democracy.

The current Trump regime and its allies among the corporate elite are what oligarchy and fascism are all about. There’s a corrupt deal among government and business people that “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” Everyday citizens pay financially and with their freedom as these corrupt government and business people get richer and richer, as well as more and more powerful.

Some of the remedies are clear but obviously require a seismic change in our elected officials:

  • Strong enforcement of antitrust laws (as the Biden administration started to do for the first time in 40 years). American capitalism has gone so far down the road of eliminating actual market place competition by allowing monopolies and oligopolies that remediation will requiring breaking up some (if not many) of the huge corporations that have been created.
  • Strong worker protection laws and agencies, including support for unions and unionization.
  • Strong consumer protection laws and agencies for all consumer goods and services, especially financial services.
  • A total revamping of our health care system to remove the corrupting profit motive that puts profits before patients. A single payer Medicare for All system is the remedy, like what every other peer country has.
  • Dramatic reform of the American campaign finance system to prevent wealthy individuals and corporations from effectively buying elected officials and policies. Matching public funds for small campaign contributions from people within a candidate’s district, tied to strict limits on other campaign funding, are the most immediate solution in the context of the Citizens United and related Supreme Court decisions. New York City and State and numerous other jurisdictions have such systems in place and they’ve produced very positive results. (See previous posts here and here for more information.)

For lots of good news see Jess Craven’s Chop Wood Carry Water blog’s most recent good news Sunday post here.

BIG CORPORATIONS AVOID TAXES WHILE EMPLOYEES STRUGGLE

SUMMARY: Eighty-eight large corporations with over $105 billion in profits paid no federal income tax in 2025. Moreover, they got almost $5 billion in tax rebates! Many large and profitable companies also pay their employees so little that they rely on government-subsidized Medicaid for health insurance and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for food. The hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes dodged each year, as well as the cost of government benefits for employees, contribute significantly to the annual federal budget deficit.

(Note: If you find a post too long to read, please just skim the bolded portions. Thanks for reading my blog!)

(Note: Please follow me and see my blog posts on Bluesky at: @jalippitt.bsky.social. Thanks!)

At least 88 large, profitable corporations paid no federal income tax in 2025. Corporate tax dodging has increased in recent years in large part because of the two tax cut laws enacted by Trump and congressional Republicans: the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill in 2025 and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in late 2017.

These 88 corporations had over $105 billion in profits, paid no income tax, and got almost $5 billion in tax rebates! Given the federal corporate income tax rate of 21%, they dodged $27 billion in taxes. Based on the 35% income tax rate in place before the two tax cut laws, these corporations had their taxes cut by $41 billion in 2025 alone. [1]

Note that this analysis includes only corporations that have filed their 2025 tax returns and are one of the 500 largest U.S. corporations. It does not include thousands of other corporations or any privately owned companies.

Here are some of the most profitable and well-known corporations that paid no 2025 federal income tax and their 2025 profits:

  • Walt Disney                $8.3 billion in profits
  • Cheniere Energy        $7.0 billion in profits
  • CVS Health                $6.6 billion in profits
  • Tesla                           $5.7 billion in profits
  • Citigroup                    $4.5 billion in profits
  • United Airlines           $4.3 billion in profits
  • Amer. Elec. Power      $3.7 billion in profits
  • PG&E                         $2.5 billion in profits
  • 3M                              $1.8 billion in profits
  • Coinbase (crypto)       $1.6 billion in profits
  • Palantir Tech.              $1.6 billion in profits
  • PayPal Holdings         $1.4 billion in profits
  • Biogen                        $1.2 billion in profits
  • Yum! Brands              $1.0 billion in profits (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, etc.)

State corporate income taxes are typically based on federal income tax laws. As a result, these 88 corporations that paid no federal income tax also paid very little state income tax; their effective state tax rate was only 1.4%.

One of the main ways corporations reduce their federal income taxes is through special tax breaks written into federal laws. These include:

  • Accelerated depreciation, which allows corporations to reduce taxes by the full amount of infrastructure expenditures in one year even if the infrastructure will last for many years. This tax break has been used to spur recovery from recessions in the past but is now a permanent part of tax law due to the two tax cut laws identified above.
  • Research and development tax credits.
  • Tax deductions for stock options given to employees.

In 2025, corporations have so far reported taking $204 billion in federal income tax breaks. This represents a huge giveaway of 18% of total corporate income taxes paid to the federal government, which were about $1,130 billion in 2025 and were paid by hundreds of thousands of corporations. [2]

Six corporations claimed $83 billion of these tax breaks (41%). These are record-breaking amounts.

  • Microsoft                                   $19 billion
  • Alphabet (Google’s parent)       $18 billion
  • Amazon                                     $17 billion
  • Meta (Facebook, Instagram)     $14 billion
  • JPMorgan Chase                       $  8 billion
  • Nvidia (chip maker)                  $  7 billion

These corporations do not need tax breaks because they are struggling; they collectively have roughly $500 billion in cash on hand. Previously, the largest one-year tax break claim had been $5 billion by JPMorgan Chase in 2024.

Meanwhile, many large and profitable companies pay employees so little that they must rely on government assistance to survive. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently analyzed data from eleven states on Americans who use government-subsidized Medicaid for health insurance (about 28 million adults) and/or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for food (about 20 million adults). Roughly half of them worked at least part-time in 2024 and of these, two-thirds worked full-time. Most of them worked for private employers in transportation, food, or retail sales jobs. Of the approximately 150 employers across the eleven states studied that had employees enrolled in Medicaid or SNAP, seventeen were among the 50 largest corporations in the country by number of employees. The following companies were among the 25 employers with the greatest number of employees using Medicaid and/or SNAP in multiple states: Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s, FedEx, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, Walgreens, and CVS. [3]

The hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes dodged each year, as well as the cost of government benefits for employees, mean that large, profitable corporations contribute significantly to the annual federal budget deficit and to the growing cumulative federal debt that just hit $40 trillion. The wealth of these corporations and their executives and shareholders gives them substantial political and economic power, which they have been wielding in their self-interest and to the detriment of all of the rest of us.

For lots of good news see Jess Craven’s Chop Wood Carry Water blog’s most recent good news Sunday post here.

[1]      Gardner, M., & Marasini, S., 4/14/26, “At least 88 profitable U.S. corporations paid zero federal income tax in 2025,” ITEP (https://itep.org/88-profitable-corporations-paid-zero-income-tax-in-2025/)

[2]      Buttikofer, S., & Gardner, M., 8/14/26, “Six companies reaped $83 billion in federal tax breaks in 2025,” ITEP (https://itep.org/six-companies-83-billion-in-federal-tax-breaks/)

[3]      U.S. Government Accountability Office, 6/22/26, “Federal social safety net programs: Millions of workers, including many employed by large employers, continue to rely on Medicaid and SNAP,” (https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108703)

TRUMP AND HIS REGIME DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU

SUMMARY: President Trump and his regime don’t care about you and aren’t protecting your health, safety, or financial security. Here are some examples of actions they have taken that put you at risk.

(Note: If you find a post too long to read, please just skim the bolded portions. Thanks for reading my blog!)

(Note: Please follow me and see my blog posts on Bluesky at: @jalippitt.bsky.social. Thanks!)

Trump and his regime don’t care about you, your health or safety, or protecting you from financial fraud and crime. They demonstrate this in many ways. Here are some examples.

The Trump regime is NOT protecting you from financial fraud and abuse. Since its first days in office, it’s been weakening the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Most recently, the Trump-controlled CFPB announced it would no longer make consumer complaints public. Failure to make complaints public will protect financial companies from scrutiny and transparency, hiding corporate misconduct from the public. It removes the incentive companies have to avoid, fix, and respond to problems that comes with public awareness and publicity. Furthermore, the CFPB recently purged its backlog of complaints and canceled a policy requiring refunds to consumers who had been overcharged. [1]

Consumer complaints filed with the CFPB have doubled in 2025 to 6.6 million (from 3.2 million in 2024). Since 2011, the CFPB has received and made public more than seventeen million complaints. Nearly six million consumers have received some form of relief in response to their CFPB complaints over its 16 years of operation. The CFPB has gotten consumers over $20 billion in compensation based on complaints involving loans, bank accounts, credit reports, and other financial matters.

The Trump regime is also NOT protecting us from drug and human trafficking as well as financial fraud because it has stopped blocking the money laundering necessary for these criminal enterprises. It has terminated the shell company [2] registry of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in the Treasury Department. Congress created the registry in 2021 through the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). It was a response to the reporting of investigative journalists who documented that between 1999 and 2017 U.S. banks had processed more than $2 trillion in potentially laundered money for criminals using shell companies and operating out of Russia, China, Iran, and Syria. At the time, Senator Rubio, now Trump’s Secretary of State, called the CTA “the most significant anti-corruption and money laundering law in decades.” [3]

To combat this extensive money laundering, the CTA requires every individual owning at least 25% of a shell company to register their legal name, date of birth, and residential street address; and provide an image of an official identification document with a unique identifying number. The Trump regime has now (probably illegally) stopped enforcing this law. [4] The termination of the shell company registry also facilitates oligarchs’ ability to hide their money and avoid taxes. Trump’s Treasury Department also destroyed the registry’s data that had been previously collected.

Law enforcement, national security experts, and small business owners are alarmed. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has called this lack of enforcement of the CTA “a gift to cartels, criminals, and U.S. adversaries.” [5]

On a different front, Trump’s Justice Department has reduced or stopped investigations and prosecutions of crimes like tax evasion, drug trafficking, and sex trafficking. The number of personnel assigned to these crimes has declined because of staffing shortages, funding cuts, and the reassignment of agents to immigration enforcement. [6]

The Trump regime is also NOT protecting your health. Measles in the U.S. is at levels not seen in many years and children have died from it. Nonetheless, Trump issued an executive order demanding states revise their recommendations for childhood vaccinations in ways that will reduce vaccinations for measles, as well as for mumps and rubella. Although the executive order does not change the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations or insurance coverage, it will increase confusion over and distrust of vaccinations that Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Kennedy has been fomenting. This will result in more diseases, disabilities, and deaths. [7]

Foodborne illnesses in the U.S. are at very high levels. This year’s 10,500 cases to-date are almost ten times the annual rates in 2021 – 2025. A major contributor is the Trump regime’s cuts of more than 40% to food safety detection systems, including reduced funding for federal agencies to conduct food inspections and for grants to state and local health departments that track outbreaks. [8]

To add insult to injury, the Trump regime is also reducing access to health insurance and raising its cost for millions of Americans. In late June 2026, its own Department of Health and Human Services reported that at least five million people lost public health insurance in the first six months of the year, a drop of about 13%. For those remaining on public plans, premiums have spiked, more than doubling for some, while deductibles have increased by about $1,000 a person for many as they chose cheaper policies. [9]

The Trump regime announced in June plans to cancel 53 of 66 active grants from the Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) program. TPP was created by bipartisan legislation in 2009 and has been credited with contributing to reducing the unwanted teen pregnancy rate by 65%. The Trump regime wants to end the comprehensive sex education of TPP programs and focus on abstinence promotion, despite evidence that abstinence only sex education is ineffective. A federal judge recently paused the regime’s attempt to put limits on the TPP grants’ sex education programs. [10]

Other examples of Trump regime actions that may hurt you:

  • Canceled the rule requiring airlines to compensate you for canceled flights (after United and Delta donated a million dollars to Trump).
  • Ended the IRS’s free tax return filing program (after the TurboTax tax return prepration software’s parent company gave a million dollars to Trump).
  • Weakened gun laws including restrictions that have been in place since 1934 on sawed-off (and therefore easily concealed) shotguns and silencers.
  • Promote cryptocurrency. But that’s a whole other story.

For lots of good news see Jess Craven’s Chop Wood Carry Water blog’s most recent good news Sunday post here.

[1]      Conley, J., 8/14/26, “In gift to abusive Wall Street firms, Trump CFPB moves to suppress consumer complaints,” Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/news/cfpb-complaint-database)

[2]      Shell companies are legal entities that don’t have any physical presence or operations but are used for moving money and processing financial transactions.

[3]      Baratta, J., 8/14/26, “Trump makes crime legal,” The American Prospect (https://prospect.org/2026/08/14/trump-makes-crime-legal-corporate-transparency-act-treasury/)

[4]      Cox Richardson, H., 8/15/26, “Letters from an American blog,” (https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-15-2026)

[5]      Baratta, J., 8/14/26, see above

[6]      Cox Richardson, H., 8/13/26, “Letters from an American blog,” (https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-13-2026)

[7]      Cox Richardson, H., 8/13/26, see above

[8]      Cox Richardson, H., 8/20/26, “Letters from an American blog,” (https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-20-2026)

[9]      Cox Richardson, H., 8/20/26, see above

[10]     Conley, J., 8/19/26, “Federal judge blocks Trump and RFK effort to get more teens pregnant,” Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/news/teen-pregnancy-programs)