Originally Posted by
CPOonfinal
The last year for which complete numbers on who pays what taxes are available was 2004. In 2004 there were 130 million individual tax returns filed. If you take the bottom 50% of those tax returns – 65 million of them – and add up the total amount of taxes those households paid you come up with $27.4 billion. This means that one corporation, Exxon Mobile, pays as much in taxes to the federal government as do the bottom half of individual taxpayers. How's that for paying your fair share.
Corporations don't pay tax - they just pass it on to the consumer, especially in the oil/gas industry. If Exxon didn't have to pay tax our gas prices would be less. If the government didn't tax gas our gas prices would be less.
Point being even though Exxon pays lots of taxes, consumers effectively pay the tax (in this case we pay 41% more for fuel than if Exxon didn't have to pay tax).
I run my own small business like this too - I figure out how much I need to make per hour to pay my salary and my taxes. That's my hourly cost. If I didn't pay taxes I could reduce my hourly cost by XX%.