At what point will shills for corporate greed ever say, “hey, you know, we can’t continue to lie about corporate taxes”. Seriously, will it be when every CEO can each buy a villa on the French Riveria — those that don’t already have one? Will it be when say the death rate for seniors who can’t afford food anymore because Medicare has been cut because of the rampant, mindless budget-cutting mania driven by deficits — deficits partly driven by corporate robbery of the Treasury — reaches say 10,000 people a week? When? Because right now there seems to be no boundary for the lying.

I never get tired of coming back to this topic because the lying is just do endemic. Here is yet another chapter — and our heroes today are Bernie Sanders and the Citizens for Tax Justice. Sanders was on Bill Maher’s show recently, when, as recounted by CTJ, the issue of corporate tax rates came up:

During a debate over spending and revenues, Senator Sanders said it’s time to ask the “one out of four corporations not paying any taxes” to contribute. The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore replied with the standard complaint, “We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. … Thirty-five percent. The Tax Foundation says the United States of America has the highest corporate tax rate.”  Sanders replied that this is the “nominal, not effective” corporate tax rate. The Tax Foundation then issued a written response claiming that even the effective corporate tax rate in the U.S. is very high compared to those of other countries.

I’ve debated Moore in the past and he usually hyperventilates but it’s often a lot of heat and mindless free market rhetoric backed up by ZERO facts. As CTJ explains, this was no different:

The U.S. statutory tax rate of 35 percent is almost entirely irrelevant. The effective corporate tax rate (what corporations actually pay as a percentage of their profits) is what matters, and it’s far lower than the statutory corporate tax rate because of the loopholes that allow corporations to avoid taxes. The U.S. effective corporate tax rate is also far lower than the Tax Foundation claimed in a written response to Senator Sanders.

While the statutory corporate income tax rate for the U.S. may be high compared to those of other countries, the total federal corporate income tax collected in the U.S. in 2010 was equal to just 1.3 percent of our gross domestic product  — in other words, 1.3 percent of our total economic output — according to the Treasury Department. The figure is 1.6 percent of GDP when state corporate income taxes are included.

Data from the Organizations for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that the OECD countries other than the U.S. collected corporate tax revenue equal to 2.8 percent of their combined GDPs in 2010. This is another way of saying that the weighted average of corporate tax collected as a percentage of GDP for the countries that are the U.S.’s main trading partners and competitors was 2.8 percent in 2010. (2010 is the most recent year for which the OECD has complete data.) [emphasis added]

And:

Ultimately, the only way to understand how much corporations are actually paying in taxes is to do the painstaking work that CTJ does in going through the financial reports filed by corporations, and uncovering the hidden tax breaks that go unnoticed in the large, error-prone databases that these other studies tend to rely on.

For example, a simple reading of Facebook’s 2012 10-K annual financial report might suggest that the company pays a very large amount of federal income tax: the income tax note for the 2012 report says the company paid a current federal income tax of $559 million on its $1.062 billion in pretax US income. This implies an effective federal tax rate of 52.6%, which is a lot.

But in fact, the company reduced its federal income taxes by more than $1 billion in 2012 through the “excess stock option” tax break, the effects of which are not reported in the income tax note. Researchers using databases that simply report the contents of the income tax note will miss this essential piece of information.

The truth is that, by any measure, U.S. corporate income taxes are very low. And as a share of the economy, they are much lower than are corporate income taxes in almost every other developed country. [emphasis added]

The last sentence is the one to brand on your brain — or maybe brand on Moore’s forehead so he is forced to carry the mark of truth everywhere he goes.