This Tax Day, Many Big Corporations Won’t Be Paying Taxes. Here’s Why.

This Tax Day, it’s hard to ignore the stark contrast between the hardworking American families paying their taxes and the big corporations avoiding paying what they owe.

Amazon, for example, avoided about $5.2 billion in corporate federal income taxes in 2021. While this is an improvement from 2018 when they net received (rather than paid) $129 million in federal income tax, there’s no denying that Amazon reaps the benefits–in this case, in the form of significant tax breaks–of our broken political system. They’re not the only ones. The fact of the matter is our political system is rigged to favor the wealthy and the powerful. Here’s how we got here.

Money in politics has always been a problem, but in 2010, the Citizens United decision opened the door to an avalanche of corporate money and dark money in our elections at exponential levels. Big donors and corporate interests immediately took advantage. An extensive network of mega donors and dark money groups have used their money to influence elections and control policy outcomes. The rest of us pay the price.

Last election cycle alone, there was $3 billion in outside spending. This election cycle, knowing that his wealthy allies would spend millions of dollars to impact the election again, Mitch McConnell promised his top recruits that if they ran for Senate, there’d be a warchest of outside money waiting for them.

But the wealthy don’t just make their mark on elections through the party structures. Already this cycle, Peter Thiel, a Republican mega-donor, publicly wrote $10 million checks to support Blake Masters in Arizona and JD Vance in Ohio.

Richard Uihlein, another billionaire conservative mega-donor, gave $2.5 million to a super PAC supporting Eric Greitens–the disgraced former Missouri governor who has physically abused his wife and son and sexually assaulted his mistress–in his run for Senate. Now thanks to just one billionaire, Greitens can be a frontrunner in a race for the United States Senate.

After the elections, when these mega donors and corporations have politicians in their pockets, the real work begins.

Investments pay off as billionaires pressure politicians to pass legislation favorable to their wallets, like corporate tax handouts, blocking bills to lower drug prices, and protecting subsidies for big oil companies.

Take what happened in 2020 for example. The second COVID relief bill that American families desperately needed was held up for months by Mitch McConnell, who was stalling to get liability protections for corporations in the bill. American families–at the height of the pandemic–went without aid for months simply because McConnell wanted to sweeten the relief deal for corporations.

Thanks to Speaker Pelosi, those corporate liability protections were left out of the final bill, but the wealthy still got plenty. They got to deduct PPP loans from their taxes, giving $120 billion to America’s top 1%. They also got a provision allowing a $6.3 billion write-off for business meals.

Sadly, parents across the country waited months for help paying the bills so that corporate titans could write off their three martini lunches.

Perhaps one of the most flagrant and corrupt instances of politicians blatantly rewarding their mega-donors is the 2017 GOP tax scam. The partisan tax bill, which was the centerpiece of the Republican-controlled House and Senate, slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and allowed corporations to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes on profits stashed overseas. It was a boon for many industries that had poured millions of dollars into elections.

For example, the top 10 Big Pharma companies received a $76 billion tax cut from the GOP tax bill. This tax giveaway added $1.9 trillion in debt and Congress will need to make deep cuts to Medicare and Social Security or force massive tax hikes on younger Americans. It was fundamentally designed to enrich corporations and mega-donors at the expense of working families.

Mega donors and corporate interests spend hundreds of millions of dollars to stack the deck in their favor in many other ways as well.

For instance, they manufacture culture wars that sow divisions, stoke fear with voters, and redirect anger away from the billionaires who are actually hurting voters. They have pushed through laws to restrict voting so that people can’t make their voices heard in opposition to corporate friendly laws. They have captured the courts, spending $400 million to radicalize the judiciary, including $52 million to stack the Supreme Court, which now sides with corporations almost exclusively.

The wealthy and the corporate elite have thoroughly rigged our political system to their advantage. On Tax Day, we see the impacts of their corrupt practices in extreme corporate tax breaks. So, when Amazon gets a $5.2 billion tax break despite reporting a record $35 billion in U.S. pretax income, it is not a bug in the system, it is the design.

Until we stop allowing corporate interests and mega donors to stack the deck, honest and hardworking Americans will continue to pay higher tax rates than corporate giants like Amazon, Fedex, and Nike. Happy Tax Day, indeed.