One problem is that it's difficult to figure out exactly what companies do pay in taxes in the U.S. After doing its analysis, the Post contacted all 30 companies on the DJIA to ask what they actually paid in taxes every year. Not a single company provided that information.

The Business Roundtable argues that the U.S. corporate rate is the highest among developed nations. But that's not really the case. The statutory rate of 35 percent is high, but the effective rate, what actually gets collected, is quite low comparatively. In fact, the effective rate fell to a 40-year low in fiscal 2011 of just 12.1 percent. As the charts below show, the United States not only taxes corporations less than other nations, it also raises less revenue from corporate taxes.



While there is a battle going on among multinational companies to keep their profits up by finding the countries with the lowest tax rate, tax reformers in the United States have been arguing for a lower statutory rate with loopholes closed. But, past experience shows, when some loopholes are closed, others get opened. Republican Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee wants that rate set at 25 percent, although a few others have argued for lower, including zero. In addition to lowering the statutory rate, he would like to lower the tax rate for repatriated overseas earnings (much of it "overseas" via those accounting tricks) to just five percent.

Globalization makes finding a means of reasonable taxation that is not squelched by tax-rate shopping difficult indeed. As the plutocrats become, individually and corporately, ever more mobile, they can be expected to crank up their search for a better deal while maintaining the high pitch of their whining about being overtaxed. They do this with a straight face even as their profits hit new records. It's all part of the class war that has returned us to 1920s levels of income and wealth inequality, the lowest tax burden on the upper tiers since pre-New Deal era. The continuing cries from those with the most for more, more, more seems now permanently connected to demands that government provide less, less, less services to those who need them most.