But it gets better. After crunching GE's numbers into 57,000 pages of tax return, it turns out that GE paid not a penny on the $14 billion dollars in profit it made that year.
I'm sure it doesn't hurt that GE's CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is a member of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and that Immelt's company has received billions of dollars worth of tax credits from our federal government because they have joined in on the taxpayer-funded green energy gravy train.
Remember folks: human nature is human nature, and if the people who run corporations and businesses out there see a way to get a leg up on their competition, they are going to take it. When the government offers that leg up in the form of tax credits and the granting of monopoly status, a corporation would be stupid to not take advantage of that opportunity, as they figure if they don't, their competition will. What needs to happen then is that our federal government needs to get out of the business of picking winners and losers in our supposedly free-market economy.
The way to stop the federal government from picking winners and losers is to return it to the limits put upon it by the Constitution. Show me where in Article I, Section 8 Congress is given the authorization to grant tax credits to selected private businesses whose work the Congress (and the President) happens to like. If consumers in this country truly wanted CFL lightbulbs, wind power, and solar power, then they would voluntarily choose to use those products rather than have them forced upon the market through the use of coercive laws and taxpayer-funded subsidies to the companies who make these otherwise unprofitable products.
There is a reason that the Founding Fathers gave the federal government such limited powers in the first place. The power to use taxpayer money to pick winners and losers in our economy, and ensuing efforts by companies to influence government in order to be in the winner column is why the federal government was not given this power in the first place.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson