Congress wants to reform the U.S. Postal Service, which, to be sure, is desperately in need of reform. Unfortunately, its proposed legislation features little more than accounting changes that would take some retirement and healthcare costs off USPS’s balance sheet and dump them into the General Fund. Taxpayer losses would then be hidden, and Americans would be saddled with even more debt, all while middle-class families are forced to continue subsidizing multi-billion-dollar corporations.
In terms of federal taxation and revenues, there is a great disparity between how corporations and families are treated by the government. Corporations pay taxes on their net income while families pay taxes on their gross income. That’s why over 50 percent of federal income taxes come from individuals and only 7 percent come from corporations. Cut the 36 percent of revenues from payroll taxes in half, and families account for 68 percent of all federal revenues!
Recently, the average federal tax rate for all American households was 20.8 percent. The average effective corporate tax rate? 1.8 percent. If this discrepancy weren’t shocking enough, Amazon, for example, paid merely $162 million in taxes on its $280 billion in revenues in 2019. For those without a calculator handy, that’s 0.057 percent.