Corporate leaders in the United States and the politicians who love them are fond of pointing to the statutory federal tax rate of 35 percent, but the reality is that businesses pay taxes in far smaller amounts. The latest study demonstrating this inconvenient fact has been published by the government itself, not exactly a font of radical theory.

The study, consistent with studies previously published by watchdog groups, found that the effective tax rate for U.S. corporations is only 12.6 percent. In other words, you are paying more taxes than some of the world’s biggest corporate behemoths. Despite all the rhetoric that flies about that would have you believe that poor innocent multi-national corporations are being bled to death, more than half of U.S.-based multi-nationals had at least one year of paying no taxes at all on their profits in the years immediately preceding the economic crash of 2008.

We are not talking small change here — corporate tax avoidance amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to some of the world’s most profitable businesses.

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