Record Profits, Zero Responsibility: The Great Tax Shell Game

By Rob C.

Art by Graeme MacKay

TL;DR: While the “ Presidementia” brags about a “booming” economy, the reality is a massive transfer of wealth from your wallet to the corporate boardroom. Corporate tax revenues have hit record highs in absolute dollars, but they’ve plummeted as a percentage of our GDP—clinging to a pathetic 1.7% while the working class carries the load. Thanks to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the 2025 “One Big Ugly Bill,” the statutory rate is a joke. At least 88 of the world’s largest, most profitable corporations—including Tesla and Yum! Brands—paid exactly zero in federal income taxes in 2025. In fact, they didn’t just pay nothing; they walked away with billions in your money via rebates.

Good morning. If you’re feeling a bit light in the pockets this Monday, don’t worry—it’s just the “Epstein Class” reaching in for their scheduled extraction. Today, we’re looking at the “Success Story” of American corporate taxation: a system where the more a company makes, the less it owes to the society that made its success possible.

The GDP Disconnect: Absolute Dollars vs. Relative Reality

Here’s a magic trick for you: Corporate tax revenues hit a record high of $497 billion in 2025. Sounds impressive, right? Like corporations are finally paying their fair share?

Now watch closely while I make that number disappear.

Those same corporations are paying less as a percentage of GDP than at any time since the 1980s. The corporate media loves to trumpet that federal corporate tax receipts are reaching “record highs” in absolute terms. And they’re technically correct— but that’s a classic accounting trick. For decades Corporate tax revenue has hovered under 2% of GDP. In fiscal year 2025, it hovered around 1.7%. Compare that to the 1950s, when corporations contributed nearly 6% of GDP. We’ve traded a functional society for a handful of C-suite press releases.

This is the shell game. The Epstein class is running the table, and you’re the mark.

The Numbers Don’t Lie (But They Do Mislead)

The TCJA and the “One Big Beautiful Bill”

The rot accelerated with the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which slashed the statutory rate from 35% to 21%. The result? Corporate tax revenue plummeted by roughly 40%. Corporations aren’t making less money. They’re making record profits. The difference? They’re not paying taxes on those profits. The U.S. now collects 1.6% of GDP from corporate taxes compared to the 3.2% OECD average. We collect less than every other G7 country except the UK. Put another way: U.S. corporations are paying half what corporations in other wealthy countries pay while raking in the highest profits in history.

But the “McJesus” of Mar-a-Lago wasn’t done. In 2025, he pushed through the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” another massive package of corporate giveaways that further incentivized tax avoidance. While corporate profits surged to nearly $3.2 trillion in 2023, the federal government’s share of that pie is smaller than the crumbs on a billionaire’s private jet.

The “Zero Tax” Wall of Shame

Here’s how the game works. Corporations and billionaires don’t just avoid paying taxes—they’ve built an entire offshore financial system designed to make their money disappear.

According to the latest report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the game is officially rigged. At least 88 profitable U.S. corporations paid zero federal income tax in 2025 despite raking in $105 billion in pretax profits.

Instead of paying the $22.1 billion they would have owed at the statutory 21% rate, these companies collectively received $4.7 billion in tax rebates. That is a $26.7 billion tax break funded directly by you.

The 2025 Zero-Tax Hall of Fame includes:

Tesla: Reported $5.7 billion in U.S. income. Total tax paid: $0.

United Airlines: Raked in $4.3 billion. Total tax paid: $0.

Yum! Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut): Over $1 billion in profits. Total tax paid: $0.

PayPal, Block, and Toast: Collectively made $3.2 billion and paid nothing.

Governments worldwide lose an estimated $480 billion in tax revenue every year to offshore tax havens. $170 billion of that comes from countries with low GDP—places that desperately need that tax revenue for basic services.

And it’s not illegal. The system is designed this way. Shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and Singapore provide strict secrecy laws that conceal the identities of ultimate beneficial owners. Money moves through layers of entities across multiple countries until tax authorities can’t trace the true owner.

Example: Robert Brockman—a billionaire charged in the largest tax evasion case in history—hid more than $2 billion in income from the IRS using offshore accounts, foreign trusts, and multiple shell companies. He died before standing trial. His case is one of thousands.

In Democracy for Sale - I wrote about how “The Pandora Papers” revealed that over 330 politicians from 90 countries used secret offshore companies to hide wealth. Over 1,500 UK properties were bought using offshore firms to conceal ownership.

This is the rigged system. By design. And it’s perfectly legal as long as you can afford the lawyers and accountants to set it up.

The “Working Rich”

Now let’s talk about who actually pays taxes in America.

People whom most of us would consider rich—the top 1% earning $675,602 or more—paid 38.4% of all federal income taxes in 2023. The top 10% paid 76% of all income taxes. The top 25% paid 89%.

The bottom 50% of earners paid just 3% of all federal income taxes. (Think about that. Half of all Americas are too poor to pay much in taxes.)

Let me be clear: these aren’t the billionaires. The top 1% includes doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners—people making high incomes but not fuck-you money. They’re paying effective tax rates of 25-28% on their income.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’s net worth increased by $99 billion from 2014-2018 because his Amazon stock climbed. But his taxable income as defined by the tax code? $4.2 billion. That $99 billion in asset appreciation (unrealized capital gains) went completely untaxed.

The super-wealthy don’t make money from wages. They make money from investments, stock options, and asset appreciation—income that’s either taxed at lower rates (capital gains) or not taxed at all (unrealized gains).

So while a surgeon making $700,000 is paying 26% effective tax rate, a billionaire is paying close to zero by stashing wealth in offshore shell companies and never realizing gains.

Corporations Pay Even Less

And corporations? They’re even worse.

The United States forfeited about $188 billion in revenues in 2024 as a result of “tax expenditures”—special tax code provisions for corporations. These include reduced tax rates for income from foreign subsidiaries and tax deductions for pass-through entities.

Corporations have increasingly shifted to pass-through structures where business income is taxed through individual income tax instead of corporate tax. This allows them to avoid corporate rates entirely while still operating as massive enterprises.

And then there’s the offshore game. U.S. corporations hold trillions of dollars in profits overseas to avoid U.S. taxes. The 2017 tax cuts were sold as a way to bring that money home. Instead, they just lowered the rate corporations pay on it and let them keep stashing more.

The Price of Apathy

This isn’t just “smart business.” It’s a systemic extraction of public resources. When these “techno-fascists” pay nothing for the infrastructure, the educated workforce, and the legal systems they use to generate their billions, they are effectively looting the future.

As I argued in my book, we are living in a society where the 1% have opted out of the contract, while the rest of us are left to pay the bill.

The evidence is in: the game is rigged. And if we don’t demand a return to a system where the “Epstein Class” pays their fair share, our children won’t just be eating dirt—they’ll be paying a “convenience fee” for the privilege.

F*CK ICE, RELEASE ALL THE FILES!

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Visit us at: democracy4sale.substack.com / democracy4sale.com

— Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.