“The average American pays about 12% of his or her income to federal income tax. Thanks to statistics compiled by US Uncut Chicago, a group that advocates boycotting U.S. corporations that avoid paying taxes in the United States, we now know the effective tax rate paid by 100 top companies for the years 2008-2010.
Of the top 100, 39 paid a lower tax rate than the average American. Of these, 11 actually ended up with refunds or credits. The lucky companies were Tesoro, Sears, Prudential, Sunoco, Dow Chemical, General Electric, Verizon, Wells Fargo, DuPont, Boeing and Honeywell.”
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Cronkite:
I believe that most of the “discrepancy” you are seeing stems from two sources:
1) Multinational corporations where taxes paid are not driven by US rates – this can mean very low tax rates for corporations set up to have a lot of earnings realized in tax havens, or high tax rates for extractive companies that sometimes must pay very high taxes on profits from the oil and minerals they pull out foreign countries.
2) Business-cycle effects, where losses (especially) and other components of current-period earnings are affected by results/assumptions/estimates from prior periods.
A good analysis would group companies by industry and show how their effective rates vary over the business cycle.
I think you’d find that some industry groups have modest variability in effective tax rates, with rates relatively near the statutory tax rate. Others would tend to have consistently high or consistently low rates. And some industry groups would have effective rates that are very sensitive to the business cycle.
With such variation, you’ll see splits in the corporate lobbying over proposals to modify corporate taxation in the US.
Industry groups paying close to statutory rates, for example, would agree with Woodshedder that a very simple system with lower rates is the way to go.
Other industry groups will agree that we need to lower rates, but insist that we can’t afford to sacrifice the favorable treatment of R&D expenses, depletion allowances, etc. while doing so.