A new study says that over the last few years, U.S. companies paid their top leaders more than they paid in taxes.
This study came out at the same time that Joe Biden and his campaign for president started calling on businesses to pay their fair share. People in the White House have said that U.S. businesses don’t pay enough taxes, and the President wants businesses to pay a bigger percentage.
A lower tax rate has been linked to having high-paid leaders for the past five years. A lot of people say that the fact that companies don’t pay taxes hurts the economy and finances of the whole US.
A lead author of the study, Sarah Anderson, said, “We have these never-ending fights in Congress over our fiscal situation, one crisis after another. One reason we’re having fiscal problems is that corporations have not been paying their fair share of taxes.”
She said, “The executive compensation system is really set up to incentivize executives to push for corporate tax cuts and take other measures that will boost the value of their shares in the short term and the value of their paychecks.”
Some of the biggest companies being blamed for this are well-known ones, like Tesla and Ford. Some say Tesla used a legal tax strategy to pay less in taxes while giving its leaders huge pay packages.
Niel Bradley is the Chief Policy Officer at the Chamber of Commerce. He said, “We haven’t seen the study, but it sounds like it was done by political hacks who don’t know how our tax system works.”
He went on to say that a company won’t have to pay as much in taxes if it reinvests its profits, has more costs than profits, or loses money. This is because it will have less profit to tax.
