Walmart Is an Enormous Tax-Dodger
A new report from Americans for Tax Fairness finds that Walmart—one of the most conspicuously flag-waving corporations in America—hides tens of billions of dollars in assets in overseas tax havens to avoid paying taxes in the US.
Taxes, you may recall, support Social Security and Medicare and the national parks and the U.S. military and other things that we all need, which is why paying taxes is a fundamentally patriotic activity. The next time you see an American flag explicitly associated with Walmart as a marketing too, please note that Walmart—like the world’s richest family, which controls it (and like Gawker Media)—systematically exploits loopholes to avoid paying its fair share of taxes in America.
The report puts the total amount of Walmart’s assets stashed in global tax havens at $76 billion. The company disputes the report in the vaguest possible way. But consider just one individual Walmart tax haven: Luxembourg. Is this the behavior of a good corporate citizen? From Bloomberg: “Units in Luxembourg — where the company has no stores — reported $1.3 billion in profits between 2010 and 2013 and paid tax at a rate of less than 1 percent, according to the report.”
I would again simply like to emphasize the gulf between the image that Walmart Corporation would like to project, and the reality, which is that it is a tax-dodging employee-impoverishing mechanism for further enriching some of the greediest billionaires on the face of the earth.
Thank you for your time.
[Image via Americans for Tax Fairness]
