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corporate taxes
The Tax Foundation’ Misleading Math Overstates How Much Billionaires Really Pay
By taking into account corporate taxes while ignoring corporate income, the foundation’s methodology drives up effective income tax rates for the super rich only because these rich happen to own a massive amount of corporate stock.
Mar 04, 2025
An income tax rate of over 100% would be hard for anyone to sustain. At a rate a smidge over 100%, our deepest pockets might be able to get by if they drew down their wealth or borrowed against it. But keeping up, year in and year out, with an income tax rate of over 1,000%, 10 times income? That seems, on its face, totally implausible.
Yet the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation would have us believe Warren Buffett did just that for at least five years running, all while enormously growing his own personal wealth.
This conclusion about Buffett’s tax situation emerges inescapably out of the claims the Tax Foundation makes in a research paper published just after last year’s November election. The paper’s title—America’s Super Rich Pay Super Amounts of Taxes, New Treasury Report Finds—could hardly lay out the Tax Foundation’s case more starkly.
Shareholders don’t pay corporate income tax obligations. Corporations do, from their corporate income.
But did the U.S. Department of the Treasury report the Tax Foundation paper references actually make such a finding? No, not even close.
The Treasury report does analyze the total tax payments of rich and ultra-rich taxpayers relative to their wealth. The report’s writers, all highly respected economists, took into account every tax that impacts a person’s wealth, directly or indirectly. One example: A corporate shareholder bears no personal responsibility for the payment of a corporation’s income tax. But the Treasury report attributes a proportionate share of that corporate tax to shareholders since corporate taxes reduce the value of shareholders’ holdings and, consequently, their wealth.
The Tax Foundation took this Treasury analysis of total tax payments by wealthy taxpayers and proceeded to blindly compare those payments to these taxpayers’ adjusted gross incomes. That comparison enables the Tax Foundation to insist, among other claims, that the nation’s richest 0.0001% of taxpayers are paying 58% of their adjusted gross incomes in taxes.
I didn’t find this specious Tax Foundation logic particularly surprising, given that I’ve commented in the past on the specious logic that runs through other Tax Foundation studies. But this new Tax Foundation paper vividly exposes how accepting the foundation’s logic and applying that logic to real life produces results so absurd that they demand some in-depth illumination.
Which brings us back to Mr. Buffett. Thanks to reporting by the independent news outlet ProPublica and publicly available information on the income tax payments of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s corporate investment base, we have considerable data on Buffett’s adjusted personal gross income, his ownership interest in Berkshire Hathaway from 2014 through 2018, and the income tax payments Berkshire made in each of those years.
We don’t have full information about Buffett’s other tax obligations, but let’s assume those obligations amounted to zero, since any additional payments would only have driven Buffett’s effective tax rate, according to the Tax Foundation’s methodology, even higher.
Warren Buffett’s ownership interest in Berkshire Hathaway—as reported in SEC filings for the years 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018—amounted to 20.5% that first year, 19.6% the next, and then 18.7%, 17.9%, and 17.2% the last three.
According to the data service macrotrends, Berkshire Hathaway’s income tax payments minus refunds for those years totaled $7.9 billion in 2014, $10.5 billion in 2015, and $9.2 billion in 2016 before sinking into refund territory in both 2017 and 2018, with $21.5 billion in refunds the first of those two years and $321 million the second.
Applying the Tax Foundation’s methodology would attribute to Buffett a share of Berkshire’s taxes paid—and refunds received—by multiplying his ownership stake in the corporation for each of the years by the corporate tax payment made or refund received for that year. Doing the math, Buffett ends up with a personal tax liability from Berkshire of over $1.5 billion.
That figure tops by more than 10 times Buffett’s adjusted personal gross income of $125 million for that same period, according to a ProPublicareview of IRS records. The bottom line: All these numbers that we get applying the Tax Foundation’s methodology bring Buffett’s effective personal income tax rate to just over 1,200%.
And Buffett would end up having paid taxes at that rate, according to the Tax Foundation methodology, at a time when Berkshire’s income tax payments, net of refunds, were running relatively low. In 2017, the massive hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria had Berkshire’s insurance businesses incurring huge losses. Without those losses, and the tax refunds resulting from them, Buffett’s effective personal tax rate—according to the Tax Foundation methodology—would have topped over 4,000%!
Impossible? Of course. So what sleight of hand is the Tax Foundation playing here? Corporate income tax payments do reduce the wealth of their shareholders. Attributing a share of those tax payments to shareholders, as the original Treasury Department study does, makes eminent sense. But shareholders don’t pay corporate income tax obligations. Corporations do, from their corporate income. The Tax Foundation, for its part, doesn’t attribute corporate income to shareholders. It only attributes corporate tax.
By taking into account corporate taxes while ignoring corporate income, the Tax Foundation’s methodology drives up effective income tax rates for the super rich only because these rich happen to own a massive amount of corporate stock. We can better understand the dynamics at play here by considering the tax situations of business owners far from billionaire status.
Consider this comparison: Taxpayers A and B each own a profitable business that generates $49,999 of income in 2025. They each reinvest all business profits in their businesses, living off the savings they have sitting in tax-exempt bonds. A and B each have $1 of other income. A, who owns his business directly, reports the profits on his personal tax return, along with his dollar of other income, and pays $10,500 in tax. His effective tax rate is 21%.
B, who owns her business through a corporation, reports the profits on the corporation’s tax return, and the corporation pays $10,500 in tax. Since B’s own adjusted gross income is just one dollar, B’s effective tax rate according to the Tax Foundation would be 1,050,000%, 50,000 times A’s effective tax rate.
In its reporting, ProPublica also considered Warren Buffett’s effective income tax rate. Taking his personal federal income tax payments as a percentage of his true economic income, including the $24.3 billion increase in his wealth between 2014 and 2018, ProPublica determined his effective income tax rate to be 0.1%. Quite a far cry from 1,200%.
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Minnesota Democrats Show It's Possible to Curb Tax Avoidance by Corporations
The state-level approach sends a clear signal that the days may be coming to an end when big multinationals can scare state lawmakers into allowing them to game the tax system.
Jul 09, 2023
Earlier this year, Minnesota lawmakers came within a whisker of enacting a sorely needed corporate tax reform that would have insulated the state from the corrosive effect of offshore corporate tax dodging. This reform, known as worldwide combined reporting, is the gold standard for corporate tax sustainability at the state level. The state’s near miss, and the second-best solution Minnesota ultimately enacted this year, known as GILTI (the Global Intangible Low Taxed Income provision), each provide a blueprint for the loophole-closing strategies that other states should prioritize.
The goal and strategy of worldwide combined reporting are simple: the goal is to prevent large multinational corporations from artificially shifting their income out of the U.S. and into foreign tax havens, and the strategy is to require big multinationals to include all their income—from the biggest nation to the smallest foreign tax haven – in one big pot before determining Minnesota’s proper share of worldwide income.
Absent this reform, big multinationals can reap huge tax cuts by shifting their U.S. profits out of Minnesota—where state tax laws can, sensibly, reach those profits—to low-rate foreign tax havens that are utterly beyond the reach of states. This income shifting remains a gigantic drain on corporate taxes, as an ITEP analysis of IRS data reveals. Because worldwide combined reporting starts by putting the income of foreign subsidiaries in the same pot as domestic profits, it takes away the incentive for companies to shift their income out of the U.S. and into tax havens.
If this strategy sounds familiar, it should: it’s the same concept as water’s edge combined reporting, a vital reform half the states have now put in place to prevent corporations from artificially shifting U.S. income into low-tax states. The “water’s edge” version prevents companies from using Delaware as a tax dodge but is helpless to prevent profits from sailing across the ocean to more exotic tax havens like the Cayman Islands or Luxembourg. Extending an existing combined report beyond the water’s edge, or enacting a combined report that immediately reaches worldwide, is a reform that would put an end to aggressive profit-shifting in one fell swoop.
When Minnesota’s House and Senate passed worldwide combined reporting earlier this year (before lawmakers lost their nerve in conference committee), it took many observers by surprise. But from a worldwide perspective, this move was anything but shocking: around the world, the walls are closing in on offshore corporate tax avoidance.
More than 140 countries have now signaled their support for a multinational effort to tax corporate income where it is earned. A new corporate tax backstop enacted by Congress and the Biden administration last year promises to help mitigate corporate efforts to hide profits in tax havens. Even the otherwise-awful Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) included provisions—most notably GILTI—designed to discourage artificial offshoring of profits. Seen through this lens, Minnesota’s move seems both predictable and welcome.
GILTI conformity is a clear second best compared to worldwide combined reporting but is nonetheless a valuable step forward. Enacted at the federal level as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the GILTI provision is designed to discourage offshore income shifting. Rather than identifying specific foreign tax havens, GILTI applies a U.S. tax to foreign profits that are disproportionately large relative to the offshore tangible assets that supposedly are generating these profits. In particular, GILTI applies to foreign income exceeding a 10 percent rate of return on foreign tangible assets.
While the GILTI approach is less explicitly targeted to specific foreign tax havens, it’s designed to ensure that large multinationals best known for shifting profits into foreign tax havens will no longer be rewarded for doing so. And early indications are that it’s achieving this goal.
For example, Minnesota-based 3M has paid an average of $65 million a year in GILTI tax over the five years since GILTI took effect at the federal level, a clear indication that the company is reaping suspiciously large profits in foreign countries where its physical footprint is small. So the state’s move to couple with this federal provision will help ensure that GILTI tax payments made by 3M and other large multinationals will benefit Minnesota taxpayers as well, to the tune of over $400 million during the next biennium.
Minnesota’s last-minute retreat from worldwide combined reporting, and subsequent embrace of GILTI, appears increasingly a Pyrrhic victory for the business lobbyists who used misleading scare tactics to jangle lawmakers’ nerves.
These lobbyists, acting at the behest of large multinational corporations, have protested vigorously against every sustainable corporate tax reform proposal in the last quarter century. They complained when more than half the states enacted water’s edge combined reporting as the 21st century began; they have pushed for a bigger sales factor, more generous manufacturing incentives and research tax credits; and have fought against better disclosure of how this raft of tax breaks affect their own tax rates. They do it not because their arguments have merit, but because pushing for ever-lower corporate taxes is their job. And, until recently, they have done their job well.
But the qualified success of Minnesota’s GILTI conformity—to say nothing of the state’s serious dalliance with the game-changing worldwide combined reporting–sends a clear signal that the days may be coming to an end when big multinationals can scare state lawmakers into allowing them to game the tax system. For lawmakers seeking to level the playing field for small businesses against the predations of big multinationals, following in Minnesota’s footsteps should be on the short list of reform goals.
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34% of Big, Profitable US Corporations Paid $0 in Federal Taxes in 1st Year of Trump Tax Law
"Instead of cutting vital and popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, we need to repeal the Trump tax breaks for the rich and demand that the largest corporations in America finally start paying their fair share of taxes," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Jan 13, 2023
A study released Friday by the Government Accountability Office found that more than a third of large, profitable corporations in the United States paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2018, the year the regressive Trump-GOP tax cuts took effect.
The GAO analysis, commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), showed that "average effective tax rates—the percentage of income paid after tax breaks—among profitable large corporations fell from 16% in 2014 to 9% in 2018."
According to the GAO, the share of profitable large corporations that owed $0 in federal income taxes after credits rose from around 22% in 2014 to 34% in 2018.
"Each year from 2014-2018, about half of large corporations and a quarter of profitable ones didn't owe federal taxes," the GAO noted. "For example, profitable corporations may not owe taxes due to prior years' losses."
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which former President Donald Trump signed into law in December 2017, slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and authorized a slew of other giveaways that made it easier for large businesses and wealthy individuals to lower their tax bills.
"While House Republicans want to make huge cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because of their 'serious concern' about the deficit, they voted to provide over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to large corporations and the top one percent," Sanders said in a statement Friday. "The situation has become so absurd that over a third of the largest and most profitable corporations in our country pay nothing in federal income taxes."
"Instead of cutting vital and popular programs like Social Security and Medicare," the senator added, "we need to repeal the Trump tax breaks for the rich and demand that the largest corporations in America finally start paying their fair share of taxes."
"The situation has become so absurd that over a third of the largest and most profitable corporations in our country pay nothing in federal income taxes."
The GAO report doesn't name the specific companies that paid nothing in federal income taxes over the period the federal agency examined.
But separate analyses from outside organizations such as the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) have identified such corporations. In 2021, ITEP found that at least 55 large U.S. corporations including Nike, FedEx, HP, and Kinder Morgan paid $0 in federal taxes on 2020 profits.
Steve Wamhoff, ITEP's federal policy director, wrote in a blog post on Friday that the GAO's new study confirms that "the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was an unprecedented gift to corporations."'
"What the GAO report really demonstrates is that no matter how you measure the federal corporate income tax, not much of it has been paid in recent years, and the 2017 tax law has brought it to a new low," Wamhoff added. "The corporate minimum tax enacted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act will help address this problem. But as ITEP has explained, another key step for Congress is to implement the international corporate minimum tax that the Biden administration negotiated with other governments, and which is designed to address the offshore tax dodging that will otherwise be very difficult to resolve."
Sanders, for his part, pointed to 2021 legislation he introduced alongside Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) that "would have restored the pre-Trump corporate tax rate of 35% and comprehensively shut down offshore corporate tax avoidance."
"The provisions in this bill to close offshore loopholes alone could raise over $1 trillion in revenue from multinational companies over the next decade," Sanders' office noted in a press release Friday.
The legislation, formally titled the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, never received a vote in the Senate or the House.
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