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In the beginning of a new series over at the NY Times entitled, "But Nobody Pays That," General Electric (G.E.) is profiled. The purpose of this new series is to "examine efforts by businesses to lower their taxes and the debate over how to improve the tax system." It starts:

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

G.E. claims that it's recent decline in its tax burden is due to huge losses in its capital lending division due to the credit crises, and many analysts don't even consider G.E. a manufacturer anymore!

Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company's profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines.

The fact of the matter is that G.E. has been attempting to skirt its tax responsibilities ever since Ronald Reagan was in office:

In the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan overhauled the tax system after learning that G.E. -- a company for which he had once worked as a commercial pitchman -- was among dozens of corporations that had used accounting gamesmanship to avoid paying any taxes.

"I didn't realize things had gotten that far out of line," Mr. Reagan told the Treasury secretary, Donald T. Regan, according to Mr. Regan's 1988 memoir. The president supported a change that closed loopholes and required G.E. to pay a far higher effective rate, up to 32.5 percent.

"Cracking down on offshore profit-shifting by financial companies like G.E. was one of the important achievements of President Reagan's 1986 Tax Reform Act," said Robert S. McIntyre, director of the liberal group Citizens for Tax Justice, who played a key role in those changes. "The fact that Congress was snookered into undermining that reform at the behest of companies like G.E. is an insult not just to Reagan, but to all the ordinary American taxpayers who have to foot the bill for G.E.’s rampant tax sheltering."

The article also details the return on investment (ROI) that G.E. gets from all of their lobbying efforts:

G.E. spends heavily on lobbying: more than $200 million over the last decade, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Records filed with election officials show a significant portion of that money was devoted to tax legislation. G.E. has even turned setbacks into successes with Congressional help. After the World Trade Organization forced the United States to halt $5 billion a year in export subsidies to G.E. and other manufacturers, the company's lawyers and lobbyists became deeply involved in rewriting a portion of the corporate tax code, according to news reports after the 2002 decision and a Congressional staff member.

By the time the measure -- the American Jobs Creation Act -- was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2004, it contained more than $13 billion a year in tax breaks for corporations, many very beneficial to G.E. One provision allowed companies to defer taxes on overseas profits from leasing planes to airlines. It was so generous -- and so tailored to G.E. and a handful of other companies -- that staff members on the House Ways and Means Committee publicly complained that G.E. would reap "an overwhelming percentage" of the estimated $100 million in annual tax savings.

According to its 2007 regulatory filing, the company saved more than $1 billion in American taxes because of that law in the three years after it was enacted.

The article goes on and on...please read...and let your Congressperson (House of Representatives and Senate) know that these tax breaks are unacceptable, especially in an era where we're all being asked to tighten our belts.

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