Income tax is based on profits, not gross revenue, not market cap.
Corporations are people too!
/sarc, but only slightly...
Yes, there are actual unprofitable businesses that are facing cyclical downturns or that are on the way to bankruptcy that legitimately truly lost money, and thus have no profits to tax, but this is often not the case.
You may be thinking of "Hollywood accounting" where costs are shifted onto a profitable movie in order to not pay profit based royalties. This is possible because the movie is not an independent accounting entity. This doesn't work with federal income tax, which is applied to the corporation as a whole.
> more favorable tax regimes
That is true, but leads to the problem of the money being stuck in those countries and not spendable in the US. Apple has this problem big time. But it's also true that it is propaganda to count a company's properly profits earned in a foreign country and where proper taxes were paid in that country as somehow evading US taxes.
For example, if X Corp was half in Germany, and half in the US, and paid 50% taxes in Germany and 50% in the US, if the headline says "X Only Paid 25% US Tax On Global Profits!!!!!" then it would be propaganda, wouldn't you say?
> this is often not the case
When the influence of unprofitable or low profit companies is not accounted for in the statistic, then the author has an agenda and the article is propaganda.
> depreciation
Depreciation allowances are based on what was paid for the item, not its value. If it is sold for more than was paid for it, the difference is taxable income.
Value not realized is also not taxable income.
I took a class in basic business accounting one summer. It was time well invested. I recommend it. (Though that doesn't make me a qualified accountant, I still use a CPA for the company books and rely on his advice. I pay no attention to what journalists say about accounting, they know as much about it as about Quantum Mechanics.)
Is it though? US citizens and tax residents (green card holders, people on work visas) pay US taxes on their worldwide income. Doesn't matter if it's earned outside the US. Doesn't matter if the person lives outside the US and hasn't set foot on American soil in decades. Doesn't matter if the income is derived from property acquired before the person ever came to America.
At best they get credit for foreign taxes paid and if that's less than their US tax liability, they pay the difference to Uncle Sam.
Why are the rules (seemingly) different for corporations?
Why? It would apply to all corporations doing business in the US, which is basically any company of note.
One reason that could explain the difference between corporate and private taxes is that the companies can (in theory) prove how and where went/came from.
"The 379 profitable members of the Fortune 500 paid an effective federal tax rate of 11.3% last year" https://www.axios.com/fortune-500-companies-corporate-income...
Amazon, in particular, made over $10b in 2018, but the US government paid them over $100m.
ETA: And for comparison, I made $36k last year (missed a lot of time for health reasons) with a family of 3 (= negative profit, I'm still in debt from it!), and my tax rate is ~8%.
Income averaging is for companies that naturally have interspersed fat and lean years. For example, Boeing may invest enormous amounts of money in new aircraft development one year and make a bunch of money off of it the next year.
> The 379 profitable members of the Fortune 500 paid an effective federal tax rate of 11.3% last year
Since the tax rate is graduated, a technically "profitable" corporation who made only $10 in profit would pay 0% in income tax.
This is why such statistics, while pedantically correct, are usually nonsense because they deliberately omit such information.