David Leonhardt of The New York Times tells us this in an article just out called "The Paradox of Corporate Taxes":

Of the 500 big companies in the well-known Standard & Poor’s stock index, 115 paid a total corporate tax rate — both federal and otherwise — of less than 20 percent over the last five years, according to an analysis of company reports done for The New York Times by Capital IQ, a research firm. Thirty-nine of those companies paid a rate less than 10 percent.

Arguably, the United States now has a corporate tax code that’s the worst of all worlds. The official rate is higher than in almost any other country, which forces companies to devote enormous time and effort to finding loopholes. Yet the government raises less money in corporate taxes than it once did, because of all the loopholes that have been added in recent decades.

  And who was the leading champ at avoiding taxes?:

A third group of companies simply seems to have become expert at avoiding taxes. When the three accounting professors analyzed more than 2,000 companies, they found big variations in tax rates within almost every subset of companies. Companies in the same industry often paid very different rates, even when they were similar in size.

G.E. is so good at avoiding taxes that some people consider its tax department to be the best in the world, even better than any law firm’s. One common strategy is maximizing the amount of profit that is officially earned in countries with low tax rates.[emphasis added]

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  So, let’s be clear about the mindset of the Immelt who was brought into to shape the president’s "Win The Future" vision: he does not care about equity or fairness or the future of the country. GE has been at the front of the line in outsourcing jobs around the world and breaking unions.

  And the company had no interest in paying a fair share in taxes. And GE, and Immelt, will now continue the phony argument that corporate taxes are a burden, a phony argument exposed by Citizens for Tax Justice:

U.S. corporations pay a smaller percentage of their profits in taxes than do corporations based in other developed nations. Corporate leaders and anti-tax politicians often point to the top statutory corporate tax rate in the U.S. — 35 percent — which is higher than that of most other countries. But because there are so many deductions, credits and other special breaks in our corporate income tax, the effective tax rate for U.S. corporations is actually relatively low.

  Apparently not low enough for GE which, per Leonhardt’s article, was the best at avoiding taxes.

  And as an expert at avoiding taxes, what will Immelt say to the president–will he hear his corporate friends or the people? As CTJ says:

Americans want corporations to pay more taxes. The Gallup Poll has asked respondents for several years whether corporations pay their "fair share," "too much" or "too little."

Between 2004 and 2009 (the only years for which there is any public data) 67 to 73 percent or respondents said corporations pay "too little." The idea that the corporate tax should be reduced seems to exist only in Washington.

In fact, many Democratic and Republican members of Congress seem to assume that the primary goal of corporate tax reform is to sharply lower the 35 percent statutory corporate tax rate. This appears to be one instance in which Washington truly is out of touch with ordinary Americans.

This kind of thinking is particularly bizarre when our government is in dire need of additional revenue to reduce the budget deficit. One would think that politicians would gravitate towards revenue-raising measures that the public approves. But instead, Congress is contemplating all sorts of program cuts that the public will have a hard time digesting. For example, the President’s fiscal commission recently proposed cutting discretionary spending by 23 percent by 2020 and cutting Social Security by 10 percent by 2050 and 16 percent by 2070.[emphasis added]

  The starving of the government–and of our society–will continue, if we allow Immelt to, in the name of "competitiveness", pursue as a White advisor the same strategy he avidly pursued at GE.