How Big Business Evades Taxes

Pacific News Service, April 9, 2004

As states and municipalities reel from service cutbacks caused by lower tax earnings, big corporations pay virtually no taxes on huge profits. They do it though elaborate “shell” games.

Were you stunned by the revelation, days before your taxes are due, that nearly two-thirds of companies operating in America reported owing no taxes from 1996 through 2000? That over 90 percent of large corporations — with at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in gross receipts — reported owing taxes of only under 5 percent?

Hitchcock’s London, with a side-trip to Hitchcock’s Marrakesh

Alfred Hitchcock fans walking into the lobby of the old Coburg Hotel must shiver a bit. This was the place in the 1972 thriller “Frenzy” where Dick Blaney (Jon Finch) took his girlfriend, the barmaid Babs Milligan (Anna Massey), after his soon-to-be murdered ex-wife (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) slipped him some cash. The bellhop led them through the square paneled glass doors, to room 322, “the cupid room.” Ask for the Dome Suite.