Comments by "Bob Hawke" (@bobhawke7373) on "Joe Biden's 'lies' fact-checked by Elon Musk's Twitter" video.

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  3. Yeah Musk's fact check, is of course, misleading. Biden's remarks make clear that he was referring to an April 2 study by the liberal-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. That study, which had received wide media coverage in recent days, found that "at least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States." The list of 55 companies is sprinkled with well-known names, including FedEx, HP, Nike, Salesforce and XCel Energy. Collectively, the study concluded, the companies earned $40.5 billion in pretax income in 2020 and would have paid taxes amounting to $8.5 billion had this income been taxed by at the standard 21% corporate rate. In reality, the companies collectively received rebates from the federal government worth $3.5 billion. The study cited several tax laws that helped protect these companies’ income from taxation, including those governing the tax treatment of executive stock options, research and experimentation, renewable energy, deductions for capital expenses, and the reallocation of losses to different tax years. Some observers told PolitiFact that they took issue with Biden’s characterization of such laws as "loopholes." Reasonable people can disagree over the wisdom of a given tax provision, but they were "deliberate policy choices, not rifle shots," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum. Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, agreed. "The problem with that framing is that many of the provisions reducing tax rates are either built into the code to properly calculate net income — such as a 100% bonus depreciation, a pro-growth provision — or provisions created to incentivize preferred activity by policymakers, such as the research and experimentation tax credit," Watson said. Still, even experts who are critical of the study’s methodology told PolitiFact that Biden accurately portrayed the gist of the report’s findings in his April 7 remarks. Notably, Biden’s remark also stopped short of blaming the companies for evading taxes; his remarks suggest that his quarrel is with the tax system that allowed the companies to legally pay so little in taxes.
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