One of the things I find darkly amusing, are lefties talking about the rich 'paying their fair share'. It's like they are blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, or having a coin with only one face. Who talks about benefits without contemplating costs, or vice versa?

Well, you know, not very 'smart' people.

Yet its even worse than that, because where the left has actual power, the rich still don't pay taxes, in fact, more often than not, they get massive subsidies from long-suffering tax-payers.

The inescapable truth is that the middle-class pays the taxes--always have and always will, which means of course that Barack Hussein Obama is lying right to your face when he promises middle-class tax cuts, stimulus targeted and the middle class, and tax hikes 'for the rich'. Its bull, and its not even original bull. Socialists have been running on the same rhetoric for decades in every western country in the world.

Case in point. Google, Inc., whose political contributions were divided 75% for Democrats and 25% for Republicans, had an effective tax rate of 2.4%, actually saving over 3 billion dollars last year. This in spite of the fact that the U.S. corporate rate is a whopping 35% and the UK, its other significant market, has a 28% rate.

Illegal and immoral machinations? Hardly.

Income shifting commonly begins when companies like Google sell or license the foreign rights to intellectual property developed in the U.S. to a subsidiary in a low-tax country. That means foreign profits based on the technology get attributed to the offshore unit, not the parent. Under U.S. tax rules, subsidiaries must pay “arm’s length” prices for the rights -- or the amount an unrelated company would.

Because the payments contribute to taxable income, the parent company has an incentive to set them as low as possible. Cutting the foreign subsidiary’s expenses effectively shifts profits overseas.

After three years of negotiations, Google received approval from the IRS in 2006 for its transfer pricing arrangement, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The IRS gave its consent in a secret pact known as an advanced pricing agreement. Google wouldn’t discuss the price set under the arrangement, which licensed the rights to its search and advertising technology and other intangible property for Europe, the Middle East and Africa to a unit called Google Ireland Holdings, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Kind of hard to be a tax cheat with the approval of the IRS, isn't it?

The article is pretty interesting, but setting aside all the comments about how companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook aren't paying enough in taxes, the reality is that the government is collaborating with these companies to reduce their taxes, and you don't get that kind of break without a damn good reason.

You just hope the reason isn't to line the pockets of a political party at the expense of the middle class, but as the last decade has taught us, we all have experienced a failure of imagination of what kind of depravity Washington can sink to.