Goldman Sachs and Income Tax

Just to annoy you all I thought I would point out how little Goldman Sachs paid in income taxes this past year. Here’s the news report from Bloomberg:
Bloomberg.com:
U.S.

During the election campaign John McCain made much of Obama’s efforts to straighten out and make fair the income tax code. Among other points McCain made was the fact that the corporate tax rate in the US is already quite high.

Well that might be the case. It’s just that you wouldn’t know if you studied the returns of most major corporations. They dodge and weave so much that their actual tax rate is often absurdly low and is sometimes zero.

So what? you could ask. Here’s ‘what’: it used to be that corporate taxes contributed a considerable part of Federal revenues. Between 15% and 20% at the high water mark. But successive efforts in Congress, aided and abetted by the flood of lobbying money, has opened so many loopholes that now the corporate tax is a minimal contributor to Federal income.

So guess who has to fill the gap? You and me.

In this context it not surprising that Goldman managed to finagle its books to avoid paying taxes. All those tax attorneys and accountants are earning their keep! Hopefully they received a decent share of the reported $10.9 billion in compensation and bonuses that Goldman paid out last year.

Paid out before taxes that is.