First, I could care less whether you put me on ignore. It seems you can dish it out but you can't take it. I do believe that doing so would leave you in fewer uncomfortable positions of trying to defend remarks that you make out of ignorance, so that may be your primary consideration.
Secondly, you say:
“We pay our fair share of taxes,” said Kenneth Cohen, Exxon Mobil’s vice president for public affairs, who in a conference call recently lumped more than $6 of sales, state and local taxes together with every $1 of federal income tax paid in 2010.
But Exxon Mobil’s tax rate is “lower than the average American’s,” Daniel Weiss, an energy expert at CAP, countered in an analysis that put the company’s U.S. federal income tax rate in 2010 at just 17.2 percent.
This, in no way, contradicts anything I've said. You cannot look at any one year and draw meaningful conclusions. Further, as I've discussed here ad nauseum, one cannot rationally look at "U.S. Federal Income Taxes" and make any determination as to whether a global corporation is paying "its fair share". It just isn't meaningful in that sense.
On the subject of tax loopholes, some do exist. But largely, they are difficult problems to solve, and the "solutions" usually lead to even more complicated scenarios to deal with. If a company relocates to an offshore "tax haven" -- which will happen when corporate rates get out of control -- what are you going to do?
As I explained to you here months ago, these are complicated arrangements and difficult or impossible to regulate. The reason nothing has been done about it in all these years is that there is no workable solution in a global economy.
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