The donor doing the most to finance Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) campaign against a recall hasn’t put the same effort into financing Wisconsin’s state government, according to income tax data obtained by a non-profit organization based in the state.

Diane Hendricks is a billionaire who donated $500,000 — the largest donation ever made in a Wisconsin governor’s race — to Walker this year, but the company she owns paid absolutely nothing in taxes from 2005 to 2008, the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future reports:

ABC Supply may be a huge money-maker for Hendricks, but the Wisconsin corporate income tax returns she files claim the company makes not a penny in taxable profit.

ABC Supply paid exactly $0.00 in state corporate income tax in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, according to the state Department of Revenue. Tax data for more recent years were not available when the information was requested from the department.

Hendricks gained notoriety earlier this month when Walker was caught on film admitting to her that he was planning a “divide and conquer” strategy with the state’s public sector unions. That strategy, which led to Walker’s signature union-busting legislation and massive protests outside the state capitol, is why Walker is now facing a recall.

Walker pitched the legislation as necessary for balancing the state’s budget, which was facing a $137 million budget deficit in 2011. According to IWF, businesses dodge $113 million in Wisconsin state taxes each year.

“It’s not known which loopholes ABC Supply used to avoid income taxes,” the IWF report said, but Hendricks has long been an advocate of lower taxes. In a 2010 editorial, she wrote, “Taxing job creators is a sure way to stop the engine of economic growth.”

Earlier this week, the CEOs of 18 corporations wrote an open letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner opining that it would be a mistake to increase the tax rate on dividends and capital gains as called for in the Obama administration’s budget. The budget treats investment income the same as ordinary wage income for households making more than $250,000.

As Citizens for Tax Justice noted, the arguments used by these CEOs to protect their own low tax rates are bunk. In addition, the CEOs oversee companies that also have exceedingly low tax rates. For instance, signing the letter were:

– Gale E. Klappa, Wisconsin Energy Corp. — Average Negative 13.2% tax rate 2008-11

– David M. McClanahan, CenterPoint Energy — Average Negative 11.3 tax rate 2008-11

– Lowell McAdam, Verizon Communications Inc. — Average Negative 3.8% tax rate 2008-11

– James E. Rogers, Duke Energy Corp. — Average Negative 3.5% tax rate 2008-11

– Benjamin G.S. Fowke III, Xcel Energy — Average 1.0% tax rate 2008-10

– Gerard M. Anderson, DTE Energy Co. — Average 0.2% tax rate 2008-11

– Gregory L. Ebel, Spectra Energy Corp. — Average 13.6% tax rate 2008-10

– Thomas A. Fanning, Southern Co. — Average 17.4% tax rate 2008-10

It’s bad enough that these corporations are contributing so much to the fact that corporate taxes are at a forty year low. But to then turn around and advocate for preserving the low rate on capitals gains — which is a leading contributor to income inequality — really adds insult to injury. Remember, it was conservative icon Ronald Reagan who completely equalized the treatment of wage income and capital gains income, rejecting the conservative argument that a lower rate on investment income is necessary.

GREENDALE, Wisconsin — Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) told students at a town hall Friday that he would not support preventing a hike in their student loan interest rates if it was paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes.

“Nope,” Ryan told Matt Kozlowski, a student at the University of Wisconsin, who had asked him if he’d support closing such loopholes to stave off an imminent rate hike:

STUDENT: My question for you would be, would you support closing corporate tax loopholes to pay for that as a revenue raiser?

RYAN: Nope. Well, I support closing tax loopholes for tax reform. [...] So that’s what we want to do with all those corporate loopholes is do that, and with the student loan bill let’s cut some spending because that’s more spending, let’s cut spending that is lower-priority spending to address this higher-priority need.

Watch a clip of Ryan’s remarks:

If Congress doesn’t act by July, student loan interest rates will double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, costing needy students as much as $1,000 per year in added interest payments.

Instead of closing corporate tax loopholes, Ryan suggested paying for the bill by cutting “lower-priority spending.” House Republicans have proposed cutting preventative health care funds that would provide hundreds of thousands of breast and cervical cancer screenings for women, and using that money to prevent the interest rate hike.

Student loan debt currently tops $1 trillion, outpacing both total credit card debt and auto loan debt. The cost of college has nearly sextupled over the past 25 years, growing far quicker than general consumer items, gasoline, and even health care.

The rub is that Ryan’s budget actually aims to close corporate tax loopholes, but does so to pay for tax breaks for wealthy individuals, not students struggling with loan debt.

In March, Vice President Joe Biden floated a tax proposal known as the global minimum tax while campaigning in Iowa. The proposal, a feature of President Obama’s budget aimed at companies that use offshore tax havens to reduce the amount they pay in income taxes, would force multinational corporations based in the United States to pay a minimum tax rate, thereby adding trillions in lost revenue that is shifted to individual taxpayers and small businesses.

At the time, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney slammed Biden’s proposal. “Instead of promoting pro-growth tax policies that provide businesses with the economic freedom to grow and prosper, he is backing a ‘global tax’ that would harm American competitiveness,” Romney said. At a campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire yesterday, however, Romney feigned ignorance of the proposal:

ROMNEY: And the vice president says he wants to do a global tax on multinationals. Not sure what that is, but it doesn’t sound very good.

Watch it:

Under the global tax plan, the 26 corporations that haven’t paid taxes in the last four years would actually have to pay taxes. So would Apple, which used offshore tax havens to dodge $2.4 billion in taxes last year. Romney’s plan, by contrast, would cut corporate taxes and the tax on profits corporations bring from overseas. His justification: America’s high corporate tax rate hurts competitiveness, and the lower repatriation rate will boost job growth. In reality, American corporations pay one of the world’s lowest tax rates, and the last repatriation holiday was a complete failure.

It’s no secret why Romney doesn’t want to talk about the global minimum tax. While his plan would provide a massive giveaway to American corporations, the plan Biden floated would actually raise corporate tax revenues — something a vast majority of Americans support.

Sales of iPhones, iPads, and iPods have made Apple the world’s most profitable technology company — its stock price is hovering around $600 a share, and it is now larger than the rest of the American retail market by itself. Apple often boasts about the number of jobs it has created in the United States; according to its own estimates, the company is responsible for a half-million American jobs.

What Apple hasn’t told Americans, though, is that an intricate financial set up utilizing low-tax states in the U.S. and offshore tax havens has allowed it to skirt billions of dollars in American taxes over the last decade. By setting up financial offices in states like Nevada — which has no income tax — and routing other profits through Ireland, Luxembourg, and nations in the Caribbean, Apple avoided an estimated $2.4 billion in American taxes in 2011 alone, the New York Times reports:

Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.

California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero. [...]

Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. [...]

Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan.

Apple’s American tax rate was 9.8 percent in 2011, according to Sullivan. Its global tax rate, however, was just 3.2 percent and has been in the single digits for the last decade. Its profits are skyrocketing. The amount it pays in taxes, however, has barely budged:

While dodging American taxes, Apple has lobbied both state and federal governments for large tax breaks. The California state legislature has passed four tax breaks aimed at tech companies since the mid-1990s — the most recent, which Apple lobbied for itself, will cost the already-crunched state government $1.5 billion a year. The company is part of a coalition called Win America that has lobbied Congress to temporarily lower the tax rate on overseas profits that are returned to the United States — even as it admits to routing profits overseas to avoid American taxes in the first place.

Corporations like Apple have argued for lower corporate tax rates in the United States, insisting that the current 35 percent tax rate is hurting growth. But while that is the highest marginal rate in the world, companies rarely pay it. The U.S. is actually near the bottom in corporate tax revenues collected; in 2009, only Iceland collected a smaller share of its GDP in taxes. That has an adverse effect on all taxpayers, who foot the bill for the $60 billion lost to corporate tax dodging each year. In 2009, offshore tax havens cost the average individual taxpayer $434; in 2010, making up the lost revenue would have required an extra $2,116 from each American small business.

Occupy protesters chanting “we pay taxes and you should too” interrupted General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt today during a speech in Detroit before the SAE World Congress. Other protesters in the hall chanted “we are the 99 percent” before being escorted off the premises by police.

“We pay 29 per cent,” Immelt responded. A GE spokesman later told CBS that “the 29 percent tax rate was what the company payed globally in 2011. In the U.S., the rate was 25 percent.”

However, that doesn’t jive with what Citizens for Tax Justice found in a recent report. CTJ calculated that GE paid an 11.3 percent tax rate in 2011, which is actually a huge increase over previous years. In 2010, for instance, GE paid -76.6 percent. In 2009, it was -52.9 percent. So in each of those years, the government subsidized the hugely profitable mega-corporation:

GE’s low taxes stem mainly from its finance arm, GE Capital, which makes big profits, but generates huge tax “losses” that reduce GE’s taxable income from its other operations. Over the past decade, GE has paid virtually nothing in federal income taxes, paying a paltry 2.3% tax rate on its $83 billion in pretax U.S. profits.

26 major corporations, GE included, had no federal income tax liability for the period between 2008 and 2011 (thought they might have owed something in an individual year), while they made billions in profits. Occupy protesters plan to protest GE’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Detroit tomorrow.

Apple and several other major tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, have been pushing for what’s known as a tax repatriation holiday, which would allow them to bring money they have stashed overseas back to the U.S. at a much lower rate than the standard 35 percent. As we have noted over and over, a repatriation holiday enacted in 2004 just provided a windfall to corporations and did not achieve any of its policy aims. And corporations, of course, proceeded to stash even more money overseas in the hopes that Congress would adopt another holiday somewhere down the line.

And as a new report from the Greenlining Institute found, tech companies are already doing quite well when it comes to lowering their tax bills. In fact, the top 30 tech companies in the Fortune 500 paid an effective tax rate of 16 percent, after making $181 billion in profits last year. Apple, despite its billions in profits, is paying lower taxes than middle class families:

The tax rate paid by these companies has plunged – from 23.6 percent in 2009 to 19.9 percent in 2010 and 16 percent in 2011. The hypothetical top corporate tax rate of 35 percent is almost entirely a fiction.

The tax rate paid by Apple, the world’s most valuable company with a stock valuation that passed $500 billion in March 2012, has dropped even more dramatically. With profits soaring past $34 billion last year, the company’s tax rate fell from 24.8 percent in 2009 to 14.7 percent in 2010 and 9.8 percent in 2011. Apple’s tax rate over the last three years was less than that of middle-income Americans with average household incomes of $64,500 per year; its 2011 tax rate was lower than that of American households making an average of $42,500 per year.

Tech companies use a variety of activities, including shifting profits offshore to low- or no-tax jurisdictions to make their tax bills dramatically drop. And a Politico review of financial documents found that the companies pushing hardest for a repatriation holiday have moved hundreds of billions of dollars overseas, counting on Congress to provide them with yet another misguided tax break.

Two-thirds of the largest 200 U.S. corporations lobbied on at least one tax bill between 2007 and 2010, and here’s why: the majority of them ended up paying lower taxes in 2010.

The eight major corporations that spent the most on lobbying, for a total $540 million, all saw their tax rates decrease. According to a Sunlight Foundation report, the odds that those companies saw lower rates merely by chance is less than 1 in 100. The odds that six of those corporations paid seven percentage points less is even lower, at only 1 in 100,000.

Instead, the reduction was likely a result of their presence in Washington, lobbying for tax giveaways.

Company	2007-2010 decline	2007 rate	2010 rate	2007- 2009 lobbying (in millions)	Estimated tax reduction (in millions)
Exxon Mobil	-1.1%	41.8%	40.7%	$81.92	-$565.32
Verizon Communications	-7.9%	27.4%	19.4%	$77.58	-$1,005.51
General Electric	-7.6%	15.0%	7.4%	$73.17	-$1,082.70
At&T	-40.4%	34.0%	-6.4%	$70.96	-$7,359.95
Altria	-1.6%	28.9%	27.4%	$63.31	-$160.66
Amgen	-7.1%	20.1%	13.0%	$58.33	-$377.16
Northrop Grumman	-11.4%	32.9%	21.5%	$57.56	-$296.08
Boeing	-7.1%	33.7%	26.5%	$56.99	-$321.5
Median among 200 companies	-0.6%	31.8%	31.6%	$5.48	-$13.08

These companies are notorious for tax dodging, like ExxonMobil, which spent the most on lobbying and paid $565 million less in taxes. AT&T received the greatest return on lobbying, paying $7.3 billion less. Both of these companies spent even more on lobbying in 2011, with Exxon spending up by $300,000 and AT&T’s up $4,834,922. Exxon’s 2011 tax rate decreased from 17.6 to 13 percent in 2011.

The Huffington Post also pointed to a 2011 study finding that the 280 most profitable corporations paid an average 18.5 percent tax rate, benefiting from industry-specific tax breaks, loopholes and offshore tax shelters.

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.