The Fortune 500 companies that didn't pay a PENNY in 2014 income tax despite being worth BILLIONS

Well, here is a dataset with operating and net margins by industry:

http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/margin.html

I’ll do the heavy lifting for you and download it in excel and sort to find those industries with operating margins under 5%:

Retail (General)
Steel
Healthcare Support Services
Engineering/Construction
Retail (Online)
Food Wholesalers
Retail (Grocery and Food)
Telecom (Wireless)
Auto & Truck
Coal & Related Energy
Brokerage & Investment Banking
Bank (Money Center)
Banks (Regional)

Nothing too important I guess. Just some inefficient businesses we will all be better off without.

Well...I don’t if you have ever owned a business. It would be nice if each and every single year every single business was profitable. Unfortunately the real world doesn’t work this way. There is always considerable risk in the business world, this is especially true with small business. In a perfect world all businesses would always be profitable under all circumstances. Here in Los Angeles the gross receipts tax is particularly unpopular with business. It has made L.A. uncompetitive with surrounding areas. It is a terrible tax which like all businesses taxes is passed on to the consumer, and hurts owners as well as employees. It is a job killer. When you tax something, you get less of it. The more you tax business, the less business activity is what you wind up with. The less business activity, the less economic activity, the less employment, the less jobs, the less revenue. It is therefore a counterproductive tax.

You make a valid point....not all businesses are profitable every year.

My main point remains however...which is the efficient businesses pay more taxes, the losing businesses get tax carry overs with loop holes. The Bottom line tax is unfair to the more efficient businesses. It encourages corporations to spend money on unproductive items because they are tax write-offs.

Result is our corporate bottom line tax rate is higher than other countries. We must create more corporations who are efficient and thus can produce products at lower costs. That is the best way to create more jobs.

The top line based tax levels the playing field. May be we need an intelligent combination of the two to help new business start ups. But if your business is over 10 years old, and it keeps losing money, it only means the management is lousy.

As for Los ANgeles situation, that will never work. We can not have an island with higher tax than neighbors. It has to be nationwide. We lived in Vancouver, WA and we could drive across the Columbia river and buy stuff sans sales tax. That was a very unfair situation for businesses in Vancouver. ALl my favorite retail golf stores in Vancouver went broke!

Well that’s why I favor the FAIR tax. All taxes are bad of course. But some are much worse than others from an economic point of view. The FAIR tax makes much more sense than income taxes, corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, inheritance taxes and other schemes designed to redistribute income and penalize job creators.

Most of those businesses have high turnover rates. Grocery store can sell the same items 100 times during the year, making a small profit 100 times. But obviously a top line tax is unfair to grocery stores. But the bottom line tax is unfair also as illustrated by this:---

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