This week, Citizens for Tax Justice released a report showing that 26 major American corporations haven’t paid federal corporate income tax for the last four years. But that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corporate tax avoidance.

In fact, the use of offshore tax havens by corporations costs the government $60 billion annually. Such tax dodging gives multinational corporations a leg up on smaller firms that can’t avoid their tax bills, whether its through higher taxes or fewer services. According to a new report from U.S. PIRG, the cost of corporate tax havens amounts to $2,116 for every small business in America:

Instead of competing on a level playing field, small businesses and those without offshore tax havens must pick up the extra tax tab and compete against the artificially lower costs of multinational companies using tax havens.

To illustrate that burden, this paper looks at how much more the average small business tax bill would need to be to cover the $60 billion in federal revenues estimated lost each year from multinational corporations using offshore tax havens. We define a small business as one with less than 100 employees, using Census Bureau data on the number of such businesses. Based on the number of small businesses in the United States, each would need to pay an additional $2,116 in taxes to shoulder this burden.

“When corporations shirk their tax burden by shifting profits legitimately made in the U.S. to offshore tax havens like the Caymans, the rest of us must pick up the tab through either cuts to public spending priorities, higher taxes, or more debt,” said U.S. PIRG’s Dan Smith, a co-author of the report. A poll commissioned by the American Sustainable Business Council, the Main Street Alliance, and the Small Business Majority — organizations seeking to level the playing field between small and large businesses — found that more than 90 percent of small business owners believe that corporate tax havens are a problem, while “three-quarters of respondents agree that their small business is harmed when loopholes allow big corporations to avoid taxes.”

President Obama has been trying, since he came into office, to crack down on some of the offshore tax havens utilized by corporations, but has been stopped by conservatives and corporate lobbying every time. Instead, Republicans have designed a “small business tax cut” that would actually further enrich hedge fund managers, sports teams, and millionaires.

Whitney Tilson, a millionaire hedge fund manager, wants President Obama to raise his taxes. Despite the fact that the Buffett Rule, the proposed minimum tax on the wealthiest Americans, would have made his federal tax bill 40 percent higher, Tilson was one of four millionaires standing with Obama yesterday at an appearance touting the rule.

Tilson also penned an editorial in the Washington Post calling for the Buffett Rule’s passage, saying, “It’s okay to raise my taxes” because “simple math and basic fairness” demand it:

It’s not class warfare to say that people like me — who aren’t suffering at all in these tough economic times, who are in many cases doing the best we’ve ever done and who can easily afford to pay more in taxes with no impact on our lifestyle — should be the first to step up and make a small sacrifice. [...]

Think of it this way: Every billion dollars not raised from millionaires is equal to a million average U.S. families each paying an extra $1,000 in taxes. That would be real hardship for a lot of families that, unlike mine, are struggling to make ends meet.

Tilson is a member of Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, a group that has called for higher taxes on the rich and protested Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist’s radical anti-tax pledge. Tilson renewed his attack on Norquist in the Post editorial, calling for a balanced plan to address the nation’s debt that includes both revenue and spending cuts. “Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge is pie-in-the-sky fantasy and dangerous demagoguery,” he wrote.

His argument that families like his “aren’t suffering at all in these tough economic times” is indeed correct. While the middle- and lower-classes have struggled to keep jobs and make ends meet, the wealthiest Americans have not. The top 1 percent of American earners captured 93 percent of income gains in 2010, and even as their incomes skyrocket, their tax rates have reached historic lows.

As ThinkProgress has detailed, the House Republican budget, authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), pays for massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans by cutting spending from programs that primarily benefit lower-income Americans. While giving an average of $187,000 to each millionaire, the budget finds 62 percent of its cuts from programs that benefit the lower- and middle-classes, kicking millions off of food stamps, gutting Pell Grants, and slashing Medicare and Medicaid.

As if that weren’t enough, according to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the budget also raises taxes for low-income Americans:

The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center has published new numbers that show the Ryan plan would raise taxes on low-income working families — those making up to $30,000 a year. That’s because, while he would extend the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of this year, he would not extend President Obama’s tax cuts for those with the lowest incomes, which will expire at the same time. Our updated report gives the details.

Ryan is, of course, taking up a fight Republicans have been waging for most of the last year. For instance, while working to ensure that the rich won’t face any tax increases any time soon, the GOP tried to block extension of a payroll tax cut, which primarily benefits the middle class, before finally relenting early this year. The GOP has also pushed the myth that nearly half of Americans don’t pay taxes in order to distort debates about tax fairness.

A majority of the Republican caucus has signed onto the radical anti-tax pledge authored by Americans for Tax Reform head Grover Norquist, assuring Americans that they would not raise taxes under any circumstance. But as their budget makes clear, Republicans do indeed support raising taxes in their quest to balance the budget, as long as those tax increases only hit the Americans who can afford them least.

Members of the 99 percent took to millionaire Chevron CEO John Watson’s home on Tuesday to protest tax loopholes for oil corporations and the extremely wealthy. Watson, who earned $1.48 million in 2010, has defended Chevron and the oil industry’s $4 billion subsidies.

Many of these protesters were from Richmond, California, where Chevron now owes $27 million more in taxes for a refinery that the county found was undervalued. According to San Jose Mercury News:

About 30 people, many of them Richmond residents, braved the drizzly conditions to protest in front of the home of CEO John Watson, whom they criticized as an example of what they called the “corporate welfare” and undue influence of the richest Californians on the state’s tax code.

“People like Watson represent the 1 percent that have destroyed opportunities for the middle class,” said Andres Soto, a Richmond resident and one of the protesters.

The protest coincided with the release of a report titled “Meet California’s 1%: How Wall Street banks, big corporations and the super rich are killing the recovery,” which among other charges claims that the state’s wealthy elite has eluded paying its fair share of taxes. The protest was organized by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), a nonprofit community organization.

Watson has publicly defended Chevron’s tax rate, claiming “We’re the highest taxed industry that I’m aware of.” But accounting for tax havens and loopholes, Chevron paid just 19 percent in federal taxes last year. Chevron stands to report even higher profits this quarter, benefiting from rising gas prices. Meanwhile, millionaires like Watson benefit from tax loopholes, which President Barack Obama’s “Buffett rule” would close.

According to a new report by Good Jobs First, an organization that promotes accountability in economic development, a growing number of companies are collecting their workers’ income tax payments and keeping them, with the approval of state governments. Instead of having their taxes go to pay for public services like schools or roads, these workers are, quite literally, handing their tax payments to their bosses:

For some people, the personal income taxes they see deducted from their paychecks aren’t supporting public services. Indeed, this is true for workers at more than 2,700 companies in 16 states.

Nearly $700 million is getting diverted each year. And it is very unlikely that the affected workers are aware, given that no state requires that the diversion be disclosed on pay stubs.

Where is the money going? To the employers of those workers. A growing number of states are diverting revenue traditionally devoted to funding essential government services to pay for lavish subsidy awards to corporations for job creation or sometimes simply job retention. The practice of redirecting large portions of the state personal income tax (PIT) withholding deducted from paychecks means many workers are, in effect, paying taxes to their boss.

Some states, such as Kentucy and Missouri, allow companies participating in certain programs to simply keep their own workers’ tax payments, never remitting them to the state. Others, such as New Jersey and North Carolina, hand the tax payments over to the state and then receive a check later.

As Reuters’ David Cay Johnston noted, allowing companies to keep their employees’ tax payments is a simple way for politicians to hand out corporate goodies without having the government itself write a check. “These deals typify corporate socialism, in which business gains are privatized and costs socialized,” he wrote. And the programs often turn into boondoggles, with states not delivering on the jobs they promised in return for pocketing their employee’s taxes.

As we’ve noted time and again, providing corporations with subsidies in order to entice them into creating jobs is a failed strategy. The fact that companies are being allowed to directly pocket their own workers taxes is just adding insult to injury.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) told Christian Broadcast Network earlier this week that the House GOP’s budget, which he wrote, was driven by his Catholic faith. “A person’s faith is central to how they conduct themselves in public and in private,” Ryan said, and Catholic principles are what led him to cut programs for the poor so as to keep people from becoming “dependent on government.”

As ThinkProgress noted Tuesday, Ryan’s budget seems to ignore Catholic social teaching that calls for protecting the poor and improving access to food, jobs, health care, housing, and the social safety net. And now religious leaders are making the same case. The founder of the PICO National Network, the largest national coalition of religious congregations, slammed Ryan’s claim of adherence to Catholic teaching as “the height of hypocrisy” in a release circulated Wednesday:

“It’s the height of hypocrisy for Rep. Ryan to claim that his approach to the budget is shaped by Catholic teaching and values,” said Fr. John Baumann, S.J., founder of PICO National Network. [...] “A central moral measure of any budget proposal is how it affects “the least of these” (Matthew 25). The needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty should come first.”

“By these measures,” the release says, “the Ryan budget is a severe failure,” noting that it cuts Medicare, Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, and “other programs that help vulnerable working families make it through tough times and live better lives,” while giving massive tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and corporations. Overall, 62 percent of Ryan’s budget cuts come from programs that benefit the poor. “The mission of the Church is to ‘bring good news to the poor’ and to protect the vulnerable, not to justify the impoverishment of the very young, the very old and the sick in order to enrich the wealthy,” the release says.

This isn’t the first time religious leaders have criticized the House GOP budget. When Ryan released the budget in March, Bishop Gene Robinson called it an “immoral disaster” that “robs the poor,” and Father Thomas Kelly, a constituent of Ryan’s, said he was “outraged” that Ryan defended the budget “on moral grounds.” Last year’s Ryan budget faced similar criticism, as religious leaders blasted it for adhering more closely to the policies of anti-religion, anti-government author Ayn Rand than to the teachings of the Bible.