As a private citizen, I took would like to only pay "income tax" on my profits—the amount of cash I have left over at the end of the year.

Corporations are people too!

/sarc, but only slightly...

The secret is that you should incorporate yourself as a business.

The negative side of that would be to keep a 2-way accounting of all the expenses you made in the entire year.

BTW, I've corresponded with a couple journalists who wrote similar articles. They admitted that they'd never read the Annual Report of the company they were complaining about, and were just repeating what someone else told them. They didn't seem to understand the meaning of common accounting terms, either.

The part that you're not taking into account is that it's very easy to use creative accounting to "not make money", despite actually making lots of money, or to make money elsewhere in more favorable tax regimes and not have to pay tax on it here.

Yes, there are actual unprofitable businesses that are facing cyclical downturns or that are on the way to bankruptcy that legitimately truly lost money, and thus have no profits to tax, but this is often not the case.

> The part that you're not taking into account is that it's very easy to use creative accounting to "not make money", despite actually making lots of money

You may be thinking of "Hollywood accounting" where costs are shifted onto a profitable movie in order to not pay profit based royalties. This is possible because the movie is not an independent accounting entity. This doesn't work with federal income tax, which is applied to the corporation as a whole.

> more favorable tax regimes

That is true, but leads to the problem of the money being stuck in those countries and not spendable in the US. Apple has this problem big time. But it's also true that it is propaganda to count a company's properly profits earned in a foreign country and where proper taxes were paid in that country as somehow evading US taxes.

For example, if X Corp was half in Germany, and half in the US, and paid 50% taxes in Germany and 50% in the US, if the headline says "X Only Paid 25% US Tax On Global Profits!!!!!" then it would be propaganda, wouldn't you say?

> this is often not the case

When the influence of unprofitable or low profit companies is not accounted for in the statistic, then the author has an agenda and the article is propaganda.

> it is propaganda to count a company's properly profits earned in a foreign country and where proper taxes were paid in that country as somehow evading US taxes.

Is it though? US citizens and tax residents (green card holders, people on work visas) pay US taxes on their worldwide income. Doesn't matter if it's earned outside the US. Doesn't matter if the person lives outside the US and hasn't set foot on American soil in decades. Doesn't matter if the income is derived from property acquired before the person ever came to America.

At best they get credit for foreign taxes paid and if that's less than their US tax liability, they pay the difference to Uncle Sam.

Why are the rules (seemingly) different for corporations?

Those taxes are unjust and unfair. Applying that to corporations would make them noncompetitive in the global economy. Be careful what you wish for.

> Applying that to corporations would make them noncompetitive in the global economy.

Why? It would apply to all corporations doing business in the US, which is basically any company of note.

The natural reaction should just be to stop taxing citizens on worldwide income.

One reason that could explain the difference between corporate and private taxes is that the companies can (in theory) prove how and where went/came from.

It would give a huge advantage to foreign companies. It would strongly discourage investment in US companies.

Please read my comment again. It would apply to every corporation doing business in the US. Regardless of where they're headquartered. And any corp of significance has to do business in the US - it's the largest market in the world.

Then wouldn’t other countries immediately retaliate with the exact same tax, but applied to American companies doing business in those countries?

True. But they'd also have to raise their tax rates to American rates, for the taxes to have any effect.

No, I wasn't thinking of "Hollywood accounting". I was thinking of the kinds of ways of "not making money" that truly do result in corporation-wide losses on paper, reliably, year after year, despite the fact that such claims are clearly false on their face because if a company was actually incurring those losses it would go bankrupt instead of expanding (which it is). One good example of such a way to manufacture a paper loss so as to avoid paying taxes, while in actuality the business's value continues to grow, is depreciation.

Ok, name one such company, read its Annual Report, and present your evidence.

> depreciation

Depreciation allowances are based on what was paid for the item, not its value. If it is sold for more than was paid for it, the difference is taxable income.

Value not realized is also not taxable income.

I took a class in basic business accounting one summer. It was time well invested. I recommend it. (Though that doesn't make me a qualified accountant, I still use a CPA for the company books and rely on his advice. I pay no attention to what journalists say about accounting, they know as much about it as about Quantum Mechanics.)

A VAT tax to ensure all companies pay their fair share would be nice.

"91 profitable Fortune 500 companies paid $0 in taxes in 2018 under Trump's tax law" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-tax-law-fortune-500-com...

"The 379 profitable members of the Fortune 500 paid an effective federal tax rate of 11.3% last year" https://www.axios.com/fortune-500-companies-corporate-income...

Amazon, in particular, made over $10b in 2018, but the US government paid them over $100m.

ETA: And for comparison, I made $36k last year (missed a lot of time for health reasons) with a family of 3 (= negative profit, I'm still in debt from it!), and my tax rate is ~8%.

The tax code allows for losses from previous years to offset taxable income in the current year. It's a form of income averaging (which is allowed for personal income tax computation in some cases).

Income averaging is for companies that naturally have interspersed fat and lean years. For example, Boeing may invest enormous amounts of money in new aircraft development one year and make a bunch of money off of it the next year.

> The 379 profitable members of the Fortune 500 paid an effective federal tax rate of 11.3% last year

Since the tax rate is graduated, a technically "profitable" corporation who made only $10 in profit would pay 0% in income tax.

This is why such statistics, while pedantically correct, are usually nonsense because they deliberately omit such information.