All around the country, Americans are feeling the pinch of high gas prices. Yet one group that is not only not feeling the pain of these prices but is profiting off of them are the big oil companies.
In fact, ExxonMobil, “the largest American oil company,” raked in $30.5 billion in profit in 2010, “making it the most profitable Fortune 500 company for the eighth year in a row.”
The Center for American Progress’s Valeri Vasquez has put out a new report titled “Exxon Mobil Dodges the Tax Man,” which finds that the effective income tax rate for the average American is higher than the effective rate for the oil giant over the past few years. The effective tax rate for the average American in 2007, the last year for which data is available, was 20.4 percent. The annual Exxon federal effective rate between 2008 and 2010, meanwhile, was 17.6 percent:
As ThinkProgress has previously documented, important services and public investments in Main Street America continue to be cut while the wealthiest among us are paying the lowest taxes in a generation. Meanwhile, a number of major corporations are going quarters and/or years without paying any federal corporate income taxes at all.