PLEASE! Learn to READ. Corporations don't pay income taxes at all; period. It doesn't make any difference HOW the tax code reads. Corporations have NEVER paid income tax, and never will. A corporation as a "person" is a legal fiction. All corporations, except non-profits and government, exist to produce a product or service which they hope to sell in the market to some customer or consumer. ALL income for the corporation is derived from the proceeds of the sales. ALL expenses, including tax expense, must be paid from the money received from the sale of the product or service. If the corporation is to survive, the money received must be greater than the expense payments raw materials, employee wages, power & light, heat, taxes of wh**ever kind, etc. The money, if any, left over is gross profit. It wiil be distributed among the stockholders in proportion to their investment level. THEY are living people. They PAY taxes. ALL taxes charged to the corporation are passed through to consumers. No accounting magic can change that because all income comes from the sales proceeds on which the intended profit is based. ONLY live people pay taxes! All the rest is a s**m to keep ignorant people from knowing what they are really paying.

Kevyn-quite simple-the cost is passed on to the companies within the respective portfolios and then on the the consumers. Common sense dictates that taxes on any kind of business are passed on to the end user. All Obama wants is to be able to give away free college to "some students". Could those be democrats of his choosing or Muslims only ? If managed properly our government has enough money coming in and should be operating on a balanced budget. Trim the fat as any successful private enterprise does and problem is solved. Good Luck America !!!

Well I wondered how the Right would respond....and look at all the eloquent answers here. What is it with you guys? All you do is RE-act instead of ACTING. No one on either side in the past has had the political cojones to take on the biggest challenges of our age: (1) The runaway train of health care costs driven by the unrestrained bloated -for-profit-system that enables Insurance Company Officers to award themselves multi million dollar bonuses while their minions denied coverage after-the-fact for newly discovered "pre-existing conditions".
(2) The 400 ton elephant in the political room: the progressively widening gap
between the middle class and the uber rich. Even billionaires themselves have voiced disquiet about paying as little as 12% on their investment income while their janitors are paying 25% on their wages.
This not class warfare. If people get rich though hard work or inheritance then more power to them. We don't need Robin Hoods to "redistribute" wealth, but what we do need is redistribution of OPPORTUNITY. This can be bought about through restructuring the tax code with either a flat tax and/or a VAT as some of you have suggested.
Obamacare is clearly a not fully functioning answer to item One but it is a start.Does anyone here think we should go back to the recent times when insurers could arbitrarily deny coverage on the flimsiest excuse? America: the wealthiest country in the world with the most expensive health care system in the world which results in a lower overall standard of care than other less developed countries. The irony that Obamacare is based on a Heritage Foundation concept (a right wing think tank that Mitt Romney based the Massachusetts system on...) seems to be forgotten in all the criticism from the Right.

At the risk of sounding smug, I predicted both Obama P**********l victories and I will make one more ; that history will be much kinder to the Homo Muslim Monkey (sic) that the mass of opinions here would suggest.

I have posted many times here in the past of the apparent inability of the GOP
to stop re-ACTING to Obama and come forward with some clever, well thought out IMAGINATIVE ideas to capture the peoples attention and IGNORE Obama,
to little avail. As long as you continue to RE-act to your opponent instead of crafting your own PRO-active policies you will continue to be defeated by your ineffective, fearful, whiny self-victimization...(and that is how the Independents in the e*****rate perceived the GOP in 2 P**********l e******ns)

...you don't believe any other part of the Government than the SS administration...that's kinda funny...in so many ways. It's called magical thinking: i.e. NOT LOGICAL.

Why Social Security is welfare
By Robert J. Samuelson
Monday, March 7, 2011;
In a recent column on the senior citizen lobby, I noted that Social Security is often
"middle-class welfare" that bleeds the country. This offended many readers. In an
e-mail, one snarled: "Social Security is not adding one penny to our national debt, you i***t." Others were more dignified: "Let's refrain from insulting individuals who have worked all their lives and contributed to the system for 50-plus years by insinuating that [their] earned benefits are welfare." Some argued that Social Security, with a $2.6 trillion trust fund, doesn't affect our budgetary predicament. Wrong. As a rule, I don't use one column to comment on another. But I'm making an exception here because the issue is so important. Recall that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the main programs for the elderly, exceed 40 percent of federal spending. Exempting them from cuts - as polls indicate many Americans prefer - would ordain massive deficits, huge tax increases or draconian reductions in other programs. That's a disastrous formula for the future.
We don't call Social Security "welfare" because it's a pejorative term, and politicians don't want to offend. So their rhetoric classifies Social Security as something else when it isn't. Here is how I define a welfare program: First, it taxes one group to support another group, meaning it's pay-as-you-go and not a contributory scheme where people's own savings pay their later benefits. And second, Congress can constantly alter benefits, reflecting changing needs, economic conditions and politics. Social Security qualifies on both counts.
Let's start with its $2.6 trillion trust fund. Doesn't this prove that people's payroll taxes were saved to pay for future benefits, disconnecting them from our larger budget problems? Well, no. Since the 1940s, Social Security has been a pay-as-you-go program. Most benefits are paid by payroll taxes on today's workers; in 2010, those taxes covered 91 percent of benefits. The trust fund's $2.6 trillion would provide only 3.5 years of benefits, which totaled about $700 billion in 2010.
The trust fund serves mainly to funnel taxes to recipients, and today's big surplus is an accident, as Charles Blahous shows in his book "Social Security: The Unfinished Work." In 1983, when the trust fund was nearly exhausted, a p**********l commission proposed fixes but underestimated their effects. The large surplus "just
developed. It wasn't planned," the commission's executive director said later. Even so, the surplus will disappear
as the number of retirees rises.
Similarly, Congress has repeatedly altered benefits. From 1950 to 1972, it increased them nine times, including a
doubling in the early 1950s. In 1972, it indexed benefits to inflation. People didn't complain when benefits rose,
but possible cuts now trigger howls that a "contract" is being broken. Not so. In a 1960 decision ( Flemming v.
Nestor ), the Supreme Court expressly rejected the argument that people have a contractual right to Social
Security. It cited the 1935 Social Security Act: "The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this Act is
hereby reserved to Congress." Congress can change the program whenever it wants.
All this makes Social Security "welfare." Benefits shift; they're not strictly proportionate to wages but are skewed
to favor low-wage earners - a value judgment reflecting who most deserves help; and they aren't paid from
workers' own "contributions." But we ignored these realities and encouraged people to think they "earned"
benefits and that Social Security is distinct from the larger budget. Politicians, pundits, think-tank experts and
journalists engaged in this charade to spare Social Security's 54 million recipients the discomfort of understanding
they're on welfare.
A relatively small elderly population sustained these fictions. Now, this is no longer possible. Contrary to the
Obama administration's posture, Social Security does affect our larger budget problem. Annual benefits already
exceed payroll taxes. The gap will grow. The trust fund holds Treasury bonds; when these are redeemed, the
needed cash can be raised only by borrowing, taxing or cutting other programs. The connection between Social
Security and the rest of the budget is brutally direct. The arcane accounting of the trust fund obscures what's
happening. Just as important, how we treat Social Security will affect how we treat Medicare and, to a lesser
extent, Medicaid.
It is because these programs involve middle-class welfare that cuts could occur without inflicting widespread
hardship. All the elderly aren't poor. In 2008, a quarter of families headed by someone 65 or older had incomes
exceeding $75,000. No doubt people would be outraged. Having been misled, they'd feel c***ted. They paid
their taxes, why can't they get all their promised benefits? But the alternative is much worse: imposing all the
burdens on younger taxpayers and cuts in other government programs. Shared sacrifice is meaningless if it
excludes older Americans.