What Does The Pot Call The Kettle?

If I owned two restaurants, and the one located in San Diego made a profit of $10,000 while the one in Los Angeles operated at a loss of $15,000, one would say that my business had a loss of $5000 for the year and that I owed no taxes. Right?

Well, no. The liberal media would pretend that my Los Angeles restaurant did not exist at all, would report that my San Diego restaurant made $10,000 in profits and would be howling that I paid no taxes because I had an army of tax accountants that allowed me to cheat the government.

General Electric is the nation’s largest corporation, and it owns a vast array of manufacturing companies which made a total profit of some $14 billion in 2009. They also own GE Capital, an investment firm that, like most investment firms in that year, suffered enormous losses. As any corporation would reasonably do, they charged their investment losses off against their manufacturing profits and wound up with a net loss on which they owed no taxes. There is nothing out of the ordinary or in any way suspicious or illegal about any of that.

The media is making much of their profits in manufacturing and the fact that they paid no taxes, claiming that “they write their own tax laws,” that “their 24,000-page tax returns are impossible to audit,” and that circumstances which permit them not to pay taxes on their income are some sort of nefarious plot hatched in cooperation with Republicans.

Lawrence O’Donnell even referenced their statement on his Friday night show that “if it were not for losses incurred by GE Capital” their tax liability would have been 21% of the income realized by their manufacturing operations, and then sailed right past that statement as if he had not even made it and launched into a comedy routine about how easy it is to fill out the five page Form 1120 corporate tax return.

The liberal media continues, of course, to mock and criticize the buffoonery and dishonesty engaged in by the conservative media.