By Pete Dolack

May 03, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  Telling you that Donald Trump lied, or that the one percent continue to succeed in their incessant class warfare, ranks in the astonishment department with being told the Sun rose in the east this morning. Do we really need more evidence?

Necessary or not, more evidence continues to be delivered. The latest delivery comes courtesy of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which has found that 60 of the largest corporations in the United States paid no income taxes for 2018 despite earning a composite $79 billion in net income. Worse, these companies actually received $4.3 billion in tax rebates.

Had these companies paid taxes at the newly reduced corporate tax rate of 21 percent, these companies would have paid $16.4 billion in taxes. So we have a difference of more than $20 billion — quite a nice return on their lobbying expenses and donations to the Trump campaign.

Heading the list is none other than Amazon. Run by the world’s richest person and recently extracting billions of dollars in subsidies in a sweepstakes in which cities across the United States competed to give away the most money, Amazon racked up $11 billion in profits last year and not only paid no taxes but received a rebate of $129 million. A total of 26 companies, including Chevron, Delta Air Lines, Duke Energy, General Motors, Molson Coors and Prudential Financial, reported net income of more than $1 billion while paying no taxes.

President Trump claimed that his massive tax cuts for corporations would directly result in the average United States household getting an annual increase of $4,000 in wages. That magical figure came from his own Council of Economic Advisers, which further claimed that the $4,000 was a “conservative” estimate. The Council went on to claim that the average U.S. household might see a raise of $9,000.