[aauchter]

The number one tax break they refer to is stock based comp. If companies paid their execs with cash (i.e. bonuses tied to share price or company performance) instead of shares, they'd have higher cash expense, and therefore wouldn't have those so called profits to tax in the first place. Such an obvious omission in this article indicates this is intentionally misleading.

The next two tax breaks (research and experimentation) and renewable energy seem worthwhile, and I'd guess popular on both sides of the isle.

[hogFeast]

But companies don't deduct stock-based comp from adjusted EPS? It is deducted for taxes, but not deducted when the board is setting targets...very selective definition of profit being used.

Btw, I did make a quick examination and some information is not accurate. For example, I knew that NKE don't have huge stock-based comp. The reason they paid no tax in 2020 was tax benefit from stock-based comp AND "Foreign-derived intangible income benefit". In 2019, they took most of their income overseas. Sometime in 2020, they stopped doing this. And in 2021, they paid $500m in income tax.

Interestingly, their effective tax rate actually fell even though they are now paying more income tax in the US (the tax-benefit from non-cash comp is now the more significant contributor to income-tax deductions, they are still gaining 370bps of effective income tax from IP shenanigans though...which is interesting given that this was supposed to have stopped from 2018).